A new kind of language

If there ever was a time when language was seen as a medium we could use without paying too much attention to it, then that time is over – we no longer take language for granted. The medium has become the object of attention, so much so that the exposition of language has come to be one of the defining intellectual characteristic of our age. Part of this inquiry wants to understand how we learn language in the first place. Learning to speak is such a ubiquitous feature of childhood it seems an inevitable and – perhaps on the face of it – a trivial aspect of human development. But..