The Pirahã do not count

In 1977, a young American missionary named Daniel Everett, affiliated with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, embarked on a journey that would take him deep into the Brazilian Amazon. He arrived with his wife and three small children, tasked with the formidable challenge of learning Pirahã—a language spoken by a small group of about 400 people living along the Maici River, a tributary of the Madeira, itself a tributary of the Amazon. His mission was to translate the New Testament into Pirahã, but over the next three decades, the language and its speakers profoundly altered his trajectory. Everett never succeeded in translating the Bible. Instead, he became the only non-Pirahã speaker fluent in the language, and his time with the community led him to abandon his faith. By the early 2000s, Everett's findings about the Pirahã language challenged fundamental assumptions in linguistics, sparking a debate that has reverberated through the field ever since.

What Pirahã is

Pirahã, belonging to the Mura language family, is now the sole survivor of its linguistic lineage. With an estimated 400-700 native speakers, the language persists in a handful of villages scattered along the Maici and Marmelos rivers. One of Pirahã's most notable features is its phoneme inventory: it consists of only three vowels and eight consonants, making it one of the smallest documented phoneme systems in any language. Its grammatical structure follows a subject-object-verb order, a pattern not uncommon among Amazonian languages. However, the verb system of Pirahã is notably complex, replete with morphological markers that indicate the speaker's source of information—whether it was witnessed, inferred, or hearsay. These features make Pirahã an intriguing language, but what truly captures the attention of linguists are the elements Everett claims it lacks.

What Everett says is missing

Daniel Everett's assertions about Pirahã, particularly those published in his 2005 paper 'Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã', have drawn considerable attention. According to Everett, the language lacks number words entirely. Instead of distinct terms for numerical values, Pirahã employs context-dependent words that denote 'small quantity' and 'large quantity'. This absence extends to fixed colour terms, where colour description relies on comparisons, such as saying 'like blood' rather than 'red'. Perhaps most provocatively, Everett claims that Pirahã lacks grammatical recursion—the ability to nest clauses within clauses, as demonstrated in sentences like 'the man that the woman saw left'. Furthermore, Everett posits that Pirahã lacks a past tense beyond the immediate past, creation myths, and extended fictional narratives. The language, he argues, is constrained by a cultural emphasis on the immediate and the directly observable, with Pirahã speakers reportedly disinclined to discuss events they have not personally verified.

Why this matters

The implications of Everett's claims reverberate through the field of linguistics, particularly in light of the 2002 Science paper by Marc Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch, which argued that recursion is the defining feature of human language. This 'Faculty of Language - Narrow Sense' hypothesis suggests that recursion is a universal trait across all human languages, biologically inherent and exclusive to our species. If Everett's claims about Pirahã hold, they present a direct contradiction to this hypothesis. A language without recursion would challenge the universality of recursion, potentially undermining the concept of Chomsky's universal grammar. Alternatively, if Pirahã were not considered a fully human language, such a proposition would be both offensive and implausible. Therefore, Everett's assertions are not merely about Pirahã; they challenge fundamental beliefs about the nature of human language itself.

The pushback

Everett's claims have faced substantial scrutiny and critique from the linguistic community. In 2009, a paper by Andrew Nevins, David Pesetsky, and Cilene Rodrigues, published in the journal Language, offered a significant counter-argument. They proposed that Everett had misanalysed certain syntactic structures in Pirahã, asserting that recursion does exist within the language. Their analysis suggested that what Everett described as conjoined-but-not-embedded clauses actually demonstrated recursive capabilities. This academic exchange continued with Everett publishing a rebuttal in the same journal, further fueling the debate. The question of Pirahã's numerical cognition has also been revisited. In 2004, Peter Gordon conducted experiments with Pirahã speakers, published in Science, indicating that they struggled with matching quantities above three or four, aligning with Everett's no-number-words claim. However, Gordon's methodology attracted criticism, prompting further studies, such as those by Frank, Everett, Fedorenko, and Gibson in 2008. These studies found mixed results: Pirahã speakers could match exact quantities when items were physically arranged but struggled with tasks requiring memory. The discourse surrounding the colour term claim has been less pronounced but remains contested.

The deeper question

Beyond the specifics of syntax and semantics, Everett's broader argument delves into the relationship between language and culture. In his 2012 book 'Language: The Cultural Tool', Everett proposes that language is profoundly shaped by cultural contexts, challenging the Chomskyan view that all languages share a universal, biologically determined grammar. According to Everett, Pirahã's alleged lack of recursion reflects not an inability but a cultural disinterest in such structures. The Pirahã culture, he suggests, prioritises immediate experience and factual reporting over speculation and narrative. This perspective frames language as a cultural tool, moulded by the needs and experiences of its speakers. In contrast, the Chomskyan paradigm holds that language faculties are biologically endowed, with all human languages conforming to an underlying universal grammar. These opposing views are not just academic disputes; they embody distinct conceptions of language as either a cultural artefact or a biological endowment. Pirahã, in this light, serves as a crucial test case.

What ethnography is and is not

Much of Everett's empirical evidence derives from single-investigator ethnography, a method that allows for deep, long-term engagement with a community. He is uniquely positioned as the only linguist with decades of experience among the Pirahã and fluency in their language. This method, however, presents challenges. The small size and insular nature of the Pirahã community mean that Everett's observations are difficult to replicate, relying heavily on his personal credibility and interpretive lens. Subsequent visits by other linguists, such as Jeanette Sakel, have corroborated some of Everett's descriptions of Pirahã's surface features while challenging his theoretical claims. These discrepancies highlight the complexities of ethnographic research as a basis for broad linguistic generalisations. The question of Everett's interpretation hinges partly on what constitutes valid evidence in this field, balancing between rigorous data collection and the interpretive nature of ethnography.

Amidst the academic debates and theoretical implications, certain truths about the Pirahã remain steadfast. They are a community of a few hundred people living in the dense forests along a tributary of the Madeira, speaking a language characterised by one of the smallest phoneme inventories known. Their worldview, as described by an American linguist who spent decades among them, is remarkably self-sufficient. Whether Pirahã grammar includes recursion, as Chomsky's theory would predict, remains an open technical debate. The presence or absence of number words is still an empirical question. And the reasons behind these linguistic characteristics—whether cultural, biological, or historical—are yet unresolved. What is indisputable is the existence of the Pirahã, their language, and the significant attention one outsider has drawn to the unique cognitive diversity embodied by their linguistic practices. Reports suggest that the Pirahã themselves view the external interest in their language with a sense of amused detachment.