Daniel Everett, a world-renowned linguist, will give a lecture at the opening of the book

D. Everett's book Language: The Cultural Tool has now reached the readers in Latvian language. This book is based on the author's personal experience acquired during more than 30 years of research into the languages of Native American and cultural language origins. D. Everett has come to the conclusion that language is a product of culture. Language has been created by humans because there was a practical need to communicate in order to survive. Thus, language is a tool that adapts to the needs of society. The book delves into the ways how culture can influence our speech and how this, in turn, can be linked to our opinion about the nature, origin and use of human language.

D. Everett notes that the diversity of the world's languages is one of the most important means of survival developed by humans as species. This is so important because every language is a tool for the thinking of its speakers and ensures successful adaptation to the living environment, as well as solves the problems specific to a certain culture. Languages contain the collective intelligence of human species, which is expressed in each language so uniquely that it is difficult to translate into others.

The introduction to the book contains a dedication by the linguist to Latvian language: “Latvian as one of the official languages of the European Union is, of course, a very important world language today, which has a long and rich history in the Indo-European language family as one of the two living Baltic languages. Its importance outweighs the number of speakers; therefore, it should find a wider reflection in modern linguistics and anthropological studies.”

“The publications dedicated to language and linguistics usually are not thought of as emotionally charged or warm. However, this is exactly how Daniel Everett's popular science book Language: The Cultural Tool can be described,” acknowledges its translator, Professor I. Druviete. “It is significant that the Latvian edition of the book is published at the very beginning of the UNESCO Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022–2032). Even though the languages and cultures of the indigenous people of the Amazon may seem distant to the Latvian reader, the world is small and interconnected these days. The book is about other countries and peoples, but it also encourages us think about ourselves. That is why it seems so important to make available to the Latvian reader the viewpoint of the world's most prominent linguists,” says I. Druviete.

The book opening celebration will take place on October 7 at 14:00 in the Small Hall of the University of Latvia.

Daniel Everett (1951) was born in Holtville, California. He holds a ScD and a master’s degree in linguistics from UNICAMP (L'Universidade Estadual in Campinas), awarded for his studies of Pirahã language. In this university he also served as a faculty member from 1981 to 1986. He then became a professor of linguistics and anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, and until 1999 headed the Department of Linguistics. After that, the researcher returned to the Amazon jungle to spend the next three years among the Pirahã and further delve into their culture and language, as well as study several other previously undescribed languages of the Amazon tribes. After returning from Brazil, he worked as a professor of phonetics and phonology at the University of Manchester, was a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, became the head of the Department of Languages, Literature and Culture at the Illinois State University in Chicago and the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University in Massachusetts. Since 2018, Daniel Everett is a professor of cognitive sciences at this university.

Daniel Everett mastered the complex language of Pirahã (an Amazonian language unrelated to any living language) and other indigenous languages of the Amazon Basin, but his goals go far beyond translating religious texts – the task pertaining to his early career as evangelist missionary in Amazon. Everett has found a number of distinctive traits in the Pirahã language, that contradict the current opinions about the universal features of the world's languages. His finding that Pirahã lacks grammatical recursion marks a revolution in linguistics. The cult linguist of the second half of the 20^th century, Noam Chomsky, stated that recursion ­– the process of embedding clauses within other clauses – is the corner stone of every language that is spoken on this earth. According to him, it is absolute universal. Recursion enables the speakers to be thrifty in their words and express their views by embedding many meaningful phrases into a single sentence. Recursion helps us in generating infinite number of expressions by using finite number of language resources that are available. Everett argues that language is social rather than innate, thereby contradicting Dr. Chomsky’s theory that there is, in our brain, an innate linguistic biological mechanism – the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) – that acquires language by mere exposure, that is to say without explicit teaching of the grammatical system.

Daniel Everett is the author of more than a hundred scientific publications. He gained world fame not only in the circles of linguists and anthropologists, but also in a much wider society with his popular science books. His first book, Don't Sleep, Here Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazon Jungle, was recognized as one of the best books in both the USA and the UK, became a bestseller and was translated into many languages. His latest books– Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious (2016) and How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention (2017) – had the same success. However, the essence of his theory is best presented in the book Language: The Cultural Tool (2012), which is now available in Latvian language.