The Language Charades: A Review of the Language Game by Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater

Language is a tool of expression and communication. This comes naturally to us that we take language for granted. We rarely question ourselves if we can ever survive without a language. How do we learn a language? Why do we learn languages, especially our first language, so fast? These questions have been the center of a contentious and still continuous debate. A debate that brought about several theories that endeavor to explain how the human language became intricate and advanced, yet so easily learnable. Chomsky (1959) claimed that language is an innate ability that is hardwired in our brains. Others, such as Everett (2012), argued that language is a cultural tool that humans invested to satisfy their communicative needs.