Language: The Cultural Tool. By Daniel Everett. Pantheon; 351
pages; $27.95. Profile; £14.99 . Buy from,  FOR half a century
an influential group of Western linguists, led by Noam Chomsky,
have argued that language is an innate human faculty, the
product of a “language organ” in the mind. Other prominent
“innatists” include Steven Pinker, an evolutionary psychologist
and author of “The Language Instinct”, and Derek Bickerton, a
linguist at the University of Hawaii and developer of a
“bioprogramme” theory of language. Innatists believe that all
languages share fundamental features. And linguistic innatism is
part of a wider debate about just how much of human nature is
wired into the brain.  Daniel Everett, a linguist at Bentley
University in Massachusetts, disagrees on both innatism and the
fundamental similarity of languages. He spent years learning
tiny languages in forbidding jungle villages, experiences he
recounted in his 2008 memoir, “Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes”.
(A former Christian missionary whose