The Language Game

Upending centuries of scholarship and challenging those who argue that the patterns of language are wired into our brains or our genes, The Language game shows how people learn to talk - not by acquiring and observing fixed meanings and rules, but by improvisation: by picking up, reusing and recombining countless linguistic fragments in creative and novel ways. When we talk, we play verbal charades, spinning intricate patterns of words to get our message across in the context of the moment. The spontaneous emergence of linguistic order turns out to be a story as remarkable as that of the emergence of life itself.