Language Matters 1: Linguistics

It is hard to think of a more fundamental question than what makes us human. Naturally, fundamental questions have many possible answers; a particularly pithy and engaging one is Francis Evans’ ‘two legs, thing using and talking’ (Evans 1998). Evans argues that humans are essentially bipedal, technological, linguistic animals, and in this essay we will focus on the last of these – the idea that humans are humans because we talk.