Dr Winford James
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The child's initial linguistic state

February 23, 2003
by Dr Winford James


Once their brain is not damaged, children everywhere acquire the language of their social network or community without either formal or informal tuition. Chinese children do so, as do American children, and African children, and South American children, and European children, and Australian children, and...West Indian children. The language they speak is best described as an idiolect of a sociolect of a dialect or variety of a language.

To better understand my last sentence, let's start with the notion of 'a language' and work backwards. English is a well-known example of 'a language', and it is spoken worldwide, but especially in England, America, and places colonised (at one time) by English-speaking people. So today we have British English, American English, Canadian English, Australian English, New Zealand English, Indian English, Nigerian English, and West Indian English, among others. In the sense of sharing a great deal of vocabulary and grammatical structure, these Englishes are the same language, but in terms of accent, way of saying certain (cultural) things, and a small number of grammatical structures, they are not the same language.

All these languages have different dialects or varieties spoken in different parts or regions of the polity in which they are spoken. So, for example, there are dialects of British English in England - in the south, in the midlands, in the north, and elsewhere. And across the length and breadth of England, there is the dialect originating and cultivated in London and other southern areas that has become the standard dialect or variety of British English - Standard British English.

These dialects/varieties, including the standard one, are reshaped into sociolects in peculiar ways in different communities, social networks, and social classes within their dialectal regions. So that there can be many sociolects of any dialect/variety depending on the number of social groupings. But these groupings are composed of individuals who are differentiated by factors such as age, gender, level of education, ethnicity, and social experience, and who, as a consequence, each speak the sociolect differently. The language of an individual is an idiolect.

If you have come with me so far, languages are therefore bundles of dialects/varieties, which are bundles of sociolects, which are bundles of idiolects. From this kind of explanation, language is quite clearly a complex phenomenon. It is this complexity that the child acquires in whatever society she is raised and socialised. She makes an idiolect for herself out of a sociolect of a dialect of a language.

But does she do so by learning the sociolect on her own (so to speak) without any biological help? Does she learn by merely listening to the human sounds around her, detecting the patterns in the words, phrases and sentences, committing them to memory, and trying out them out until she gets them right (that is, produces them more or less as adults do)? Or does she come with a brain that is specially wired to acquire any language without the burden of plenty conscious memorising, pattern detection, and learning?

One popular acquisition theory is that, given the great speed and uniformity with which children learn a sociolect without tutoring from caregivers and older children (who simply have too little conscious knowledge of that sociolect to teach it to anybody), all children are born with a language (the same language) which prepares them to acquire their sociolect without thinking consciously about it. This language is called Universal Grammar, which is shortened to UG.

UG is conceived of as a biological system or architecture of language principles and parameters that is richly textured (in ways that linguists are trying to discover through comparative study of similarities and differences in the structure of different languages). It is not learnt. It is a biological device that enables a child who is placed in any society to learn its language and learn it fast and well enough in order to communicate with ease.

There are therefore, in the way I am talking here, two kinds of language - a social language that the child acquires as an idiolect and a biological language that she is born with which enables her to acquire that social language with astonishing efficiency.

In Trinidad and Tobago, children acquire sociolects of English and (especially) Creole without being taught and they do so through the possession of the facilitative UG. No parent or caregiver teaches children to learn Creole; rather, the very opposite is true: they teach them not to learn Creole in preference for the standard dialect of English. But irony of ironies and shock of shocks, the children learn Creole in spite of the negative attitude, and learn it so well that they can communicate effortlessly and unconsciously in it. And one proof of this is available in this season of Carnival where the calypsos and soca and chutney songs are alive with this Creole. These local songs are created and sung by Trinbagonians who have grown up in/on the Creole, and many tent-goers would have them in no other language.

I will show you in a follow-up column how it is impossible for children to have consciously learnt a particular grammatical structure in their sociolect.

The child's initial linguistic state, II


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