Language as a Social Institution: Why Phonemes and Words Do Not Live in the Brain

It is proposed that a language, in a rich, high-dimensional form, is part of the cultural environment of the child learner. A language is the product of a community of speakers who develop its phonological, lexical, and phrasal patterns over many generations. The language emerges from the joint behavior of many agents in the community acting as a complex adaptive system. Its form only roughly approximates the low-dimensional structures that our traditional phonology highlights. Those who study spoken language have attempted to approach it as an internal knowledge structure rather than as a communal institution or set of conventions for coordination of activity. We also find it very difficult to avoid being deceived into seeing language in the form employed by our writing system as letters, words, and sentences. But our writing system is a further set of conventions that approximate the high-dimensional spoken language in a consistent and regularized graphical form.