Are we born prepared to speak?
Everyone learns to speak without instructions or manuals. Why does language, with all its inherent complexity, come from within? The universal grammar hypothesis, formulated more than half a century ago, attempts to answer this question.
PalmThere are few things more universal than speech. Where there are humans, there is language. Whether in the desert, the Arctic, or a city of millions, children begin to speak without anyone explicitly teaching them how. They don't consult manuals, they aren't given lessons, and yet, in just a few years, a child masters a language with all its complexities: they make agreement, conjugate verbs, understand nuances, create sentences they've never heard before, and even correct adults. How is this possible?
More than sixty years ago, the American linguist Noam Chomsky argued that this ease could not be explained solely by imitation. According to him, the human brain contains a set of basic principles that define what a human language can be. This set is what he called ''Universal grammar,' a common mental structure that allows us to learn any language and that each child adapts according to the language they feel comfortable with: Catalan, Norwegian, Swahili, Quechua, or any other. Speaking, according to this theory, is more than a cultural skill, a biological capacity: another part of what makes us human.
Behaviorist view
Before Chomsky, the behaviorist view dominated: language was seen as a habit learned through repetition. However, there are some issues that challenge this idea. For example, children make mistakes they haven't heard adults make (like saying '*dead'instead of 'death', '*lying down'for 'state') or create their own neologisms (for example, they can say that someone is a 'dormámicas' (if they want to express that they sleep a lot). This indicates that they are not repeating what adults say, but applying rules they have deduced. The brain does not memorize sentences: it develops patterns.
Language is, in this sense, generative: from a finite set of words and rules, we can construct an endless number of sentences. According to Chomsky, this creative capacity is universal. The essence of human language is, therefore, recursion, the possibility of linking ideas within other ideas—for example, 'The child who saw the doll playing with the dog that my neighbors have...' and so on ad infinitum. No other animal communication system achieves this level of flexibility.
This innate linguistic 'software' explains such simple facts as a child being able to distinguish, without being taught, between possible and impossible sentences. In any language, there are restrictions that are not explicitly learned. We know that a sentence like 'What did it rain yesterday?' It's good in Catalan, but 'Ayer llover va que?' isn't. The difference isn't in memory, but in how the brain recognizes the hierarchical structure of sentences.
Given this, the so-called 'Generative linguistics, in addition to asking what each language is like, wants to know what they all have in common. It's not just about describing which irregular verbs Catalan has or how weak pronouns work in Romance languages, but about understanding what structures are possible in any human language and why other systems, such as birdsong or computer code, don't have the same characteristics.
Over the years, various schools of thought in linguistics have refined the theory. Cognitivists, for example, believe that the similarities between languages don't stem from an innate grammar, but from the general way the brain processes information. Language, in their view, is an emergent product of human cognition, not a separate mechanism. These exceptions don't dismantle the theory, but they do mark its limitations. Today, then, universal grammar is generally considered minimal, a kind of set of biological predispositions that make language possible, but which at the same time allow for diversity.
In fact, neurolinguistics has confirmed that there are areas of the brain dedicated to language, which are activated even in children who do not yet speak. At the same time, linguistic typology shows that there are constant patterns in very diverse languages: for example, it seems that all languages distinguish between nouns and verbs, all can express affirmation and negation, and all indicate who performs the action and who receives it. No language escapes these categories, however different the ways in which they are manifested may be.
Species property
All of this supports the idea that language is a property of the species, not a cultural invention. However, it is necessary to understand that biology can explain the capacity, but not the specific form that each language takes. Catalan and Lakota originate from the human brain itself, but they have been built over centuries of history, contact, and evolution. Interestingly, the debate has been reopened with artificial intelligence. Large language models, such as machine translation, generative AI systems, and voice assistants, learn patterns from millions of texts. They reproduce many human regularities without having a brain or a universal grammar, but currently they have some limitations. In this sense, it seems that there is more than just statistics: a human capacity to create meaning, to combine words and ideas in ways that machines, for the moment, can only imitate. Are we, then, born prepared to speak? Science has not yet provided a definitive answer to this question, but all indications suggest that we are, at least in part. Language is a biological heritage as powerful as vision or movement, and at the same time a unique cultural creation. In fact, we could argue that no other human activity combines nature and culture so seamlessly. Perhaps the beauty of language lies precisely in this balance: we all share the same capacity, yet no two languages sound exactly alike.
