The Piraha challenge: an Amazonian tribe takes grammar to a strange place

Science News, Dec 10, 2005 by Bruce Bower

When Daniel L. Everett and his wife Keren Everett started spending 6 to 8 months each year with the Piraha people of Brazil's Amazon rain forest in 1977, they hoped to decipher a language that had long stumped missionaries in the region. By 1980, the two outsiders spoke the native tongue well enough to field an intriguing proposal from villagers: to teach them to count and to read. The villagers hoped that counting would prevent them from getting cheated when trading Brazil nuts and other goods for products such as tobacco and whiskey ferried through the area by Portuguese riverboat owners.

So for the next few months, Daniel Everett--alinguist affiliated with the University of Manchester in England and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany--and Keren Everett, a missionary with linguistic training, ran evening classes in math and literacy for the forest dwellers. However, although the Piraha know volumes about hunting and jungle survival, the group flunked both courses. None of the roughly 30 people who regularly attended classes learned to count to 10. None learned to add 3 1, or even 1 1.

Reading lessons ended abruptly when, after weeks of painstaking work, the students managed to read a Piraha word aloud and in unison. Everyone laughed. Daniel Everett asked what was so funny, and his students responded that what they had just said sounded like their word for sky. That's correct, Everett replied. The Piraha immediately became agitated and asked to stop the lessons.

"Their motivation for attending literacy classes turned out to be, according to them, that it was fun to be together and I made popcorn," Everett says.

Piraha problems with reading, writing, and arithmetic stemmed not from slow-wittedness but from a cultural conviction about how to converse, Everett proposes. From the villagers' perspective, talking should concern only knowledge based on one's personal, immediate experience. No Piraha refers to abstract concepts or to distant places and times.

As a result, Piraha grammar bucks all sorts of linguistic conventions, according to Everett. The language lacks words for quantities, contains no standard words for colors, shows no sign of expanding or combining sentences through the use of clauses, rarely uses pronouns, employs just two tenses, and features only a few kinship terms, which refer mainly to living relatives.

Moreover, the Piraha tell no creation myths and don't make up stories or draw pictures. They believe in spirits that they directly encounter at times, "but there's no great god who created all the spirits, in the Piraha view" Everett says.

Cultural mandates to express only one's immediate experience and to shun outsiders' knowledge have kept the Piraha population, which now amounts to around 200 people, from learning other languages despite more than 200 years of regular contact with Brazilians and various Amazonian groups, he adds.

Yet despite the simplicity of its grammar, the Piraha language matches other languages in complexity, Everett says. The villagers communicate almost as much by singing, whistling, and humming as they do with spoken words, he reports. Moreover, they convey a rich spectrum of emotions as they speak by systematically varying syllable intonations.

Everett lays out his argument for culture as a prime force in shaping the unusual Piraha language in the August-October CurrentAnthropology. The eight scientific responses published with his article range from supportive to incredulous.

Everett expected criticism. His findings challenge the influential theory that all spoken languages draw on common grammatical rules. Proponents of that premise believe that the human brain comes equipped with grammar networks, as a biological consequence of Stone Age evolution.

Instead, Everett champions an approach that held sway in the first half of the 20th century. Influential anthropologists and linguists of that era argued that cultural values mold how people talk, just as a language's expressive power shapes a culture's traits. If that's the case, basic elements of grammar can differ from one culture to the next, and cultural and social forces continually alter the fundamental rules of language.

"It took me 27 years to work up the courage to say these things about Piraha grammar," says Everett. Now, he's standing his ground.

COUNTED OUT In a particularly surprising twist, the Piraha language--unlike any other recorded tongue--employs no numbers or other quantity terms, Everett contends. It lacks words that would translate as all, many, most, few, each, and every.

Words for whole and part are used only to describe specific experiences, such as a person's plans to trade a whole snakeskin. If a piece of the skin is removed before the transaction, villagers still i say that "the whole thing" was traded because they're referring to the entire skin that was available at the time of the exchange.

A psycholinguist who studied the Piraha people disagrees with Everett. Peter Gordon of Columbia University spent several months with the Everetts in the Amazon testing Piraha counting abilities. Gordon asked villagers to line up AA batteries so that they matched, in number, arrays of 1 to 10 objects that he presented. Other tasks included asking volunteers to indicate when all the nuts that Gordon had deposited in a can and extracted one at a time had been removed.