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The Language Game

How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World

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The Language Game

By: Morten H. Christiansen, Nick Chater
Narrated by: Peter Noble
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

What is language? Why do we have it? Where does it come from? Why does that matter?

Upending centuries of scholarship (including, most recently, Chomsky and Pinker) The Language Game shows how people learn to talk not by acquiring fixed meanings and rules, but by picking up, reusing and recombining countless linguistic fragments in novel ways.

Drawing on entertaining and persuasive examples from across the world, the book explains:

  • How our short-lived memory copes with the on-rushing deluge of sound that is everyday speech.
  • Why it is that language is such a challenge for language scientists but learnt effortlessly by toddlers.
  • Why the languages of the world are so spectacularly varied—and why no two people speak quite the same language.
  • Why humans have language, but chimps don't.
  • How language gave us a big brain and changed the course of evolution
  • How language doesn't limit, but does shape, how we think.
  • And ultimately, why what we have come to understand about how language works, gives us greater hope for our future.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater (P)2022 Penguin Audio Communication & Social Skills English Linguistics Logic & Language

Critic Reviews

"Highly original and convincing...a delight to read!" (Daniel Everett)

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Profile Image for G Peilon

Brilliant

Excellent book. A must read for anybody interested in language. It proposes a very different and much better explanation of how language works. 

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