Language opens the world to other possibilities.
A laboratory for thinking with language.
"Dog bites man" is not news; "man bites dog" is. Language is built not from a simple rule for lining up words but from nested trees. Why word-chain devices fail and what phrase-structure grammar solves, tested on "either … or."
Read the essay How do babies, monkeys, and adults with no language think without words? Rotating letters in the mind, Turing's machine, and the trap in "Ralph is an elephant." Why Pinker argues that English cannot be the medium of thought.
"Newspeak," "the Hopi have no concept of time," "Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow." How much of this is true? Pinker checks Whorf's argument and three of his examples: colour words, Hopi time, and snow.
Some people lose grammar while the rest of their intelligence is intact. Others are severely impaired in intelligence yet talk fluently. What this double dissociation does to the view that language is just general smarts.
Parents don't teach grammar, yet three-year-olds use "-s" correctly over ninety percent of the time and pick the right "is" when making a question. Chomsky's poverty-of-the-stimulus argument, checked with a unicorn question and an experiment with Jabba the Hutt.
Adults speak a clumsy makeshift jargon; their children rebuild it into a new language with complex grammar. Hawaiian Creole, the sign language born in Nicaraguan deaf schools, and Simon, the boy who signed better than his parents.
Pinker rejects the common view that language is humanity's greatest invention. The spider-web analogy, Darwin's 1871 observation, first contact in the New Guinea highlands, and his answer to the objection that 'universal' does not mean 'innate.'
Nobody teaches children grammar, so why do they come to speak? Pinker's answer is that language is an instinct. The shape of the argument, the four kinds of evidence behind it, and where this series goes.
Ferdinand de Saussure Reading Saussure in the Original Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct 
Edward Sapir 
Ludwig Wittgenstein 
Wilhelm von Humboldt 
Plato 
Aristotle 
Antoine Arnauld 
Noam Chomsky 
J. L. Austin 
A Genealogy of "What Is Language" 
William Jones 
Jacob Grimm 
Max Müller 
Otto Jespersen 
Rasmus Rask 
Franz Bopp 
August Schleicher 
Karl Brugmann 
David W. Anthony 
A Genealogy of "Why Does Language Change" 
Ōtsuki Fumihiko 
Yamada Yoshio 
Hashimoto Shinkichi 
Arisaka Hideyo 
Shinmura Izuru 
Orikuchi Shinobu 
Ueda Kazutoshi 
Kanazawa Shōzaburō 
Matsushita Daizaburō 
Modern Classics of Japanese: A Summary 
Bunshō Tokuhon 1: The Whole Book Bunshō Tokuhon 2: Varieties of Prose Bunshō Tokuhon 3: The Prose of Fiction Bunshō Tokuhon 4: Technique 
My Individualism Reading Botchan Through Language Reading I Am a Cat Through Language Sōseki's Japanese The Basics of Japanese, Learned Through Kokoro 
Thom Scott-Phillips How words signify
Language and thought
Communities in conversation
Who defines meaning?
Can words cause harm?
The power of definition
What language can do
Languages and meanings lost
Open research by Human / AI