What is language? Why do we have it? Why does that matter? Language is perhaps humanity's most astonishing accomplishment and one that remains poorly understood. Upending centuries of scholarship (including, most recently, Chomsky and Pinker) The Language Game shows how people learn to talk not by acquiring fixed meanings and rules, but by picking up, reusing, and recombining countless linguistic fragments in novel ways. Drawing on examples from across the world the book explains -- How our short-lived memory copes with the on-rushing deluge of sound that is everyday speech. Why it is that language is such a challenge for language scientists but learnt effortlessly by toddlers. Why the languages of the world are so spectacularly varied -- and why no two people speak quite the same language.

What is language? Why do we have it? Why does that matter? Language is perhaps humanity's most astonishing accomplishment and one that remains poorly understood. Upending centuries of scholarship (including, most recently, Chomsky and Pinker) The Language Game shows how people learn to talk not by acquiring fixed meanings and rules, but by picking up, reusing, and recombining countless linguistic fragments in novel ways. Drawing on examples from across the world the book explains -- How our short-lived memory copes with the on-rushing deluge of sound that is everyday speech. Why it is that language is such a challenge for language scientists but learnt effortlessly by toddlers. Why the languages of the world are so spectacularly varied -- and why no two people speak quite the same language.