Review by Mark Abley of Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and language in the Amazonian Jungle by Daniel L. Everett. Pantheon. 283 pages.

Reviewed in the Globe and Mail, January 24, 2009.

Daniel Everett flew into the Brazilian jungle in December, 1977, a California linguist keen to study a language already suspected to be among the oddest in the world.

Pirahã, found along a major tributary of the Amazon, had resisted the efforts of previous linguists to decipher it, and its speakers had always spurned the blandishments of missionaries.

Some Pirahãs spoke broken Portuguese; many were unilingual. Everett was both a linguist and a missionary. He and his family were sent to Brazil by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (now SIL International), an evangelical body whose members aim to translate the Bible into every human tongue.

Three decades later, thanks to Everett, the Pirahãs are famous — in scholarly circles, anyway. Their language is a scandal: It can't exist. Except it does. It uses just 11 sounds (English has 40; many other languages have far more). Its speakers communicate not just by talking but by specialized forms of humming and whistling. The Pirahãs live without mythology and social hierarchy, and have only the simplest of kinship systems. Their language has no numbers and no words for colours. And — oh yes — it shows no evidence of recursion.

Bear with me: I promise not to get too technical. In linguistics, recursion is the ability to embed a sentence within another. In English, we don't need to say: "The loon is near the shore. The loon keeps on calling." Because of recursion, we can say: "The loon that is near the shore keeps on calling." According to Noam Chomsky, whose theories have governed linguistic discourse for the past half-century, recursion is an essential property of all languages. Universal grammar — also called the language instinct — relies on recursion. If a language can flourish without it, then the entire discipline has been mistaken for decades. It's as if botany had suddenly awakened to the existence of a tree without a trunk.

That's why the Pirahãs may now be getting heartily sick of foreign researchers invading their territory with video recorders, laptops and the like. The researchers are testing Everett's contention that Pirahã conveys all the information its speakers need through short sentences, each with a single verb. A lack of recursion would mean, among other things, that the number of sentences in the language is finite — another blow against Chomskyan principles. Yet, the author insists, the Pirahãs' discourse "is rich, artistic, and able to express anything that they want to say within their self-imposed parameters." Notice that phrase "self-imposed."

Everett's analysis of the language makes up but one element of this remarkable, somewhat unwieldy book (the writing betrays a certain amount of haste and inexperience). In the first part of Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, he says relatively little about the Pirahã language, concentrating instead on his family's immersion in a new landscape and culture. This may seem like a long throat-clearing; it's actually a strategy. Everett's stories of the Pirahãs — light sleepers, hard workers, great talkers, quick laughers — bring to life the culture that fosters the language. The stories also anchor his linguistic proposals in anthropology. Most linguists might take this as an insult; Everett would accept it as a compliment.

The publicity given his work in the past few years (including a New Yorker profile) has made him a hugely controversial figure in the academic world — a man whose radicalism stretches far beyond the key issue of recursion. In the book's fierce and subtle second part, Everett questions the Chomskyan idea that a separate grammar-learning faculty is a property of the human genome. Among those who now dominate linguistics, he charges, "it is almost as if the fact that language has meaning and is spoken by human beings is irrelevant to the enterprise of understanding it."

If he has his way, that will promptly change. Aligning himself not with Chomsky but with the earlier linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir, Everett insists that culture can shape grammar. What may seem to us like quirks in the Pirahã language — even its absence of numbers — are to him explainable by qualities inherent in the culture, a culture that has perhaps endured for tens of thousands of years. The Pirahãs adhere to what (unfortunately, I think) Everett calls the IEP: immediacy of experience principle. He believes this principle informs every utterance they make. Because of it, they are incapable of abstract speech.

This is total heresy, of course. "If I am correct that culture can exercise major effects on grammar," Everett admits, "then the theory I committed most of my research career to … is dead wrong." That theory, the Chomskyan one, minimizes the need for field work, preferring to engage with structural models of language. But in some of Everett's most fighting words, "linguistics apart from anthropology and field research is like chemistry apart from chemicals."

The book's final chapter veers off in another direction. Having entered Brazil as a missionary, the author gradually became an atheist: "All the doctrines and faith I had held dear were a glaring irrelevancy in this culture. They were superstition to the Pirahãs. And they began to seem more and more like superstition to me."

The Pirahãs, he says, have no sense of sin and no fear of death. Abandonment of Christianity cost Everett his first marriage; the people he aimed to convert had instead converted him.

And his reputation now depends on their language.

Mark Abley's books include Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages (2003) and The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches From the Future of English (2008). He lives in Montreal.

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