The Language Instinct

How the Mind Creates Language

By: Steven Pinker

Narrated by: Arthur Morey

In this classic, the world’s expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution.

The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.

©2011 Steven Pinker (P)2011 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Pinker writes with acid verve." ( Atlantic Monthly)

"An extremely valuable book, very informative, and very well written." (Noam Chomsky)

More about linguists than I expected

Not a book that should've been translated to audio format in my opinion. I got through half of the book before I couldn't handle what felt like a linguistics class to me. It also went on for a surprising amount of time about how bad AI is which outdated it quite a bit. I knew I didn't agree with all of Pinker's ideas but I was looking forward to hearing them. Didn't feel like I heard any of them though, just a laundry list of fricatives, phonemes, and phonetics.

Exceptional Book

Has great overlap of Linguistics and Psychology, and a very broad yet detailed look at the world through the lens of language.

A must read

This book is an interesting primer on linguistics. At times the material is difficult, but a "reread" will help clarify some of the more difficult passages. This is not only an overview of how we use language, but a glimpse into how our minds work. If you are at all interested in the mechanics and the development of language from infancy into adulthood, this is definitely a book for you to read.

Doesn’t hold up 25 years later

Pinker is very dismissive of views that don’t conform to his own. In a recently added afterward he frequently blames other people for misunderstanding his writing. This is an ironic claim for a language expert. The performance is adequate but the book contains many diagrams that are missed by the listener.

Textbook For Linguists

Any additional comments?

I have always had an interest in language, but this book goes WAY too in-depth for my interests. I enjoyed the first quarter of the book and it held my interest with cognitive science and evolutionary theory related to language development. Then it moved long-term into highly-detailed language structure and other details that couldn't hold my attention - think 9th grade grammar on steroids. I stuck with it for a few more hours and also tried skipping ahead, but I knew I was wasting my time and bailed on it half way through. It didn't help that the narrator is the type who over-enunciates and has a passionless, unnatural speaking style that reminds you with every syllable that they are a professional narrator with apparently zero interest in the topic.