ashnistrike | I am not qualified to do this study... (Reply)

Natural languages are born when communities of children who don't share a language come together. This can be because they speak different languages, or because they haven't got a full language to begin with. Neither isolated children nor communities of adults seem to be capable of doing this. Newborn languages are almost exclusively learned by children; you get the first adult speakers when those children grow up. Constructed languages are born when one adult, or a small group of adults, deliberately creates a vocabulary and a grammar. They teach this language first to other adults. If a linguistic community forms, it is likely to have more adults than children; the language may never be taken up by a viable population of children at all. According to the innateness hypothesis, pre-adolescent children have an instinct that eases the learning of language. This instinct includes the predisposition to look for certain language-like patterns in the environment, but also to create them from non-grammatical language-like input, given a large enough group. The way that new natural languages are born, and the fact that it requires kids, is considered strong evidence for innateness. The innateness hypothesis should also predict, then, that languages deliberately created by adults and learned largely by adults should have different properties than languages created spontaneously by children and learned largely by children. In some fashion, you should be able to tell by looking at the structure of a language whether it's natural or constructed. Yes? Has someone already done this research? If not, could they please?