The Language Instinct

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

Cover of the first edition
Author	Steven Pinker
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Psycholinguistics, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary psychology of language, linguistics
Published	1994 (William Morrow and Company)
Media type	Print
Pages	483
ISBN	0-688-12141-1
Followed by	How the Mind Works

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language is a 1994 book by Steven Pinker, written for a general audience. Pinker argues that humans are born with an innate capacity for language. He deals sympathetically with Noam Chomsky's claim that all human language shows evidence of a universal grammar, but dissents from Chomsky's skepticism that evolutionary theory can explain the human language instinct.