The World's Most Controversial Language
Not a conlang, not talking animals -- just a plain old natural human language that has stirred up a whole lotta drama.
There have been a handful of moments in which I’ve been suddenly jolted awake with new information that makes my brain explode. I distinctly remember this happening to me during a Japanese 101 class I took in college. While learning about adjectives, my professor offhandedly commented that Nintendo had combined “warui” (meaning “bad”) with Mario (as in, bros) to create his arch-rival Wario (or, bad Mario). I remember yelling, “WHAT?” while no one else in my class acted even a little bit surprised. (And yes, that’s also why there’s Luigi and Waluigi. I know. Mind-blowing. Or maybe not. Does everyone know this already??)
Another one of these moments happened for me again last year (with a similarly isolating aftermath) while a professor was lecturing about one of the fundamental qualities of human language: recursion, or our ability to embed a clause within a clause. (This was discussed briefly in my last article about the talking animals of TikTok.)
Just before moving on, my professor casually threw out this bombshell: “Of course, there’s a linguist who claims that this one language Pirahã doesn’t have any recursion at all. But who knows for sure.” I whipped my head around the classroom to see if anyone was as shocked to hear this as I was. And once again, nobody backed me up. Disheartened, I scribbled it down in my notebook for future Googling, and here we are now.
So what’s the big deal with a language not having recursion? And what kind of controversy has it stirred up in the world of linguistics?
Learning About Pirahã
Pirahã is spoken by a few hundred people indigenous to Northern Brazil along the Amazon. It is a relatively simple language phonologically, consisting of just three vowels and eight consonants. Like Mandarin or Vietnamese, it is a tonal language — but it is also so interconnected with pitch, stress, and rhythm that it can be whistled or hummed.
At least, that’s what we think. Because everything that non-Pirahã speakers know about Pirahã has to be taken with a grain of salt, for a few reasons. The main one is that there is pretty much only one linguist who is fluent in Pirahã, and as a result, much of our information about the language comes from him and him alone.
That person is Daniel Everett. He first came into contact with the Pirahã in the 70s as a Christian missionary (he has since renounced his faith), and his data and grammatical conclusions are the cornerstone for pretty much any work that’s been done on Pirahã over the last few decades.
The Pirahã are relatively isolated, so it’s not that easy for outsiders to just show up. As a result, in terms of linguistics, we have to accept a lot of Everett’s claims about the language at face value. And his claims are certainly interesting.
For one, Pirahã is among one of the few languages of the world that distinguishes colors with just two words, meaning “light” and “dark.” Pirahã also eschews numerical systems, opting instead for words that signal “smaller quantity” and “larger quantity” contextually.1
Pirahã is not alone in having some of these characteristics, but there is one more that really made linguists around the world gasp in shock and horror. Yes, Everett claims that Pirahã lacks recursion.
An example illustrates this phenomenon. Steve Sheldon’s (a fellow missionary) interpretation of the Pirahã utterance “ti xaigia ao ogi gio ai hi ahapita” would be an example of something that does have recursion — “Well, then I and the big Brazilian woman disappeared” (with “I and the big Brazilian woman” displaying two noun phrases embedded into one).
But Everett’s interpretation is a little different. Rather than seeing a conjunction, he believes that the more accurate translation is something like this: “Well, [with respect to me'], the very big foreigner went away again.”2 Which, if interpreted this way, does not display any recursion.
After a few decades with the Pirahã, Everett officially published a 2005 paper presenting his bold claims — and was immediately pounced on by the field of linguistics as a whole. Some attempted to refute his paper, sourcing their counterarguments from Everett’s very own data provided in his 1982 dissertation, but he responded by saying that new data had since “changed his mind."3 There was also an effort in 2012 to search out examples of recursion through a corpus (or linguistic collection) of 1,000 stories transcribed by another missionary. They ultimately didn't find anything definitive, but claim to have found "suggestive evidence" of recursion.
Recursion-hunting in Pirahã by linguists is still ongoing, and in my own opinion, it’s a little bit of a wild goose chase. Data is hard to come by (Everett is known to be protective of his), and when our starting point of investigation is Everett's findings, it's hard to make a compelling argument for something that looks different.
So, why this mad dash to dig for a feature that may or may not be there? Languages all exhibit variation — what makes Pirahã any different?
What makes a language a language?
Unlike glottal stops, tones, or writing systems, recursion has been thought for decades to be a universal characteristic of all human language. Noam Chomsky even specifically named recursion to be the cornerstone of his groundbreaking linguistic theory Universal Grammar. So when one language seemingly lacks this feature that is thought to be innately inseparable from language, this forces linguists to re-evaluate everything about language from the very beginning: what makes a language, anyway?
Interestingly, Everett claims that he’s not interested in destroying Chomsky’s theories. But he is quite keen on sparking conversation about one specific concept: the idea of linguistic relativity, or how language affects the way we think. It’s been a controversial subject for decades (familiarly known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which we can certainly turn to in future newsletters). Everett sees Pirahã as being a prime example of this, claiming that its lack of recursion is not just a random anomaly — rather, it is innately connected to the very way of life and way of thinking that the Pirahã embody.
What does this even mean? According to Everett, Pirahã speech refers almost exclusively to present, observable reality — and as a result, abstract concepts (such as “hello,” “thank you,” or agreeing/disagreeing), distant history, and even creation myths are not present in Pirahã culture. (In fact, it was the Pirahãs’ values and ways of thinking about the world that led to Everett renouncing his religion.)
But Everett has received a lot of pushback on this characterization, and his work with the Pirahã in general. Some scholars — Brazilian ones in particular — argue that Everett’s description of Pirahã culture and thought is far too simplistic, over-romanticized for a Western audience. (I also must take this moment to recognize that my clickbait-ish title is complicit in doing the same thing.) According to Miguel Oliveira, a linguistics professor at Federal University of Alagoas, Everett is “widely resented” by Brazilian scholars.
It’s certainly a sticky issue when one man — and a non-Pirahã man at that — seemingly holds the key into understanding (and controlling the narrative about) the Pirahã way of life. When we get down to it, the controversy isn’t just about linguistics. It’s about how we view and talk about language, plus the communities that languages are so inherently connected to. It’s about who knowledge belongs to and who gets to share it. And it’s about what we choose to do with that knowledge once we receive it.
There is a LOT more that we can talk about when it comes to Pirahã (including social norms, kinship hierarchies, lack of coercion…). But at least when it comes to the controversy of recursion, we may never perfectly parse out exactly how the Pirahã language functions (or more accurately, how it fits into our preexisting paradigms of how language should work). And I think that’s okay. I don’t see Pirahã as a disruptor of everything that we know about language, but rather, as a treasure trove that will take time to sift through.
Finally, languages like Pirahã that shake up our ideas about what language should look like are nothing to be feared — they are to be deeply valued! If you’re interested in learning more about our rich linguistic world, especially during this time in which non-dominant languages are being overrun by dominant ones, please consider subscribing to this newsletter!
Thanks for reading today’s article. You may have noticed that I had to skip last Tuesday (my first missed week since I started writing this newsletter). I’m currently a student and a teacher at the same time, and the work has certainly piled up! Regardless, I will do my best to be consistent with getting these newsletters out. Thanks for your patience and flexibility.
See you next Tuesday!
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/books/a-new-book-and-film-about-rare-amazonian-language.html
https://news.mit.edu/2016/data-amazonian-piraha-language-debate-0309
https://aeon.co/essays/why-language-is-not-everything-that-noam-chomsky-said-it-is)
That Mario bros part at the beginning blew my mind! I had no idea! I could totally relate to being mind blown and looking around and feeling alone haha. I wrote an article once on linguistic relativity and wrote about Pirahã, too, but I never delved into recursion in the language. It was a great read! Thanks!