In December 1977 a young American missionary named Daniel Everett stepped off a small plane beside the Maici River, deep in the Brazilian Amazon. He had been sent by the Summer Institute of Linguistics to learn Pirahã, the language of a hunter-gatherer people numbering a few hundred, and to translate the New Testament into it. The assignment looked routine. It ended, three decades later, with the Pirahã unconverted, Everett's Christian faith gone, and the most bitter public argument in modern linguistics.
Pirahã, the last surviving member of the Mura language family, is strange by any measure. Everett's analysis gives it one of the smallest sound inventories ever recorded — around eleven phonemes for men, and one fewer for women, who use a slightly reduced consonant set. Because so much of its information rides on tone, stress and syllable weight, Pirahã can be hummed or sung, and men whistle it while hunting. By Everett's account it has no fixed words for colours, only descriptive phrases along the lines of 'like blood'. Strangest of all, it appears to have no numbers. Its two quantity words, hói and hoí, distinguished mainly by tone, mean something like 'a small amount' and 'a larger amount'. There is no word for 'one', no counting sequence, no way to ask for exactly three fish.
The war over recursion
In 2002 Noam Chomsky, writing with Marc Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch, published an influential paper arguing that the core of the human language faculty — perhaps the only uniquely human part — is recursion: the ability to embed structures inside structures, as in 'the man who owns the dog that bit me'. Three years later Everett dropped a bombshell in the journal Current Anthropology, claiming that Pirahã has no recursion at all — no clause ever sits inside another. He traced this, and the missing numbers, to a cultural rule he called the immediacy-of-experience principle: Pirahã speech, he argued, largely confines itself to what speakers, or people they know, have directly witnessed. If even one language could do without recursion, the supposed universal core of grammar looked shaky. The counterattack came in 2009, when the linguists Andrew Nevins, David Pesetsky and Cilene Rodrigues published a long rebuttal arguing that Everett's new claims were contradicted by his own earlier fieldwork. Everett replied in kind; Chomsky, in interviews, was reportedly dismissive to the point of calling him a charlatan. The dispute remains unresolved, not least because almost no outside researcher speaks Pirahã well enough to check.
Counting without number words
The numbers claim, at least, has been put to experimental test. In 2004 the psychologist Peter Gordon published a study in the journal Science: asked to match small sets of objects, Pirahã adults performed well at two or three items but fell away sharply as the quantities grew — evidence, he argued, that without number words, exact larger quantities are genuinely hard to hold in mind. A 2008 study led by Michael Frank of MIT went further, concluding that even hói is not an exact 'one' but a relative term, making Pirahã perhaps a language with no exact number words whatsoever. The findings made it a star exhibit in the long-running debate over the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis — the idea that the language you speak shapes what you can easily think. On this view, counting is not a human universal at all but a cultural technology, like writing — one that the Pirahã, needing no tally of possessions or trade, simply never adopted.
The human story runs underneath the academic one. Everett has recounted that the Pirahã asked him whether he had ever seen Jesus; when he admitted he had not, they saw no reason to take his word about a man he had never met. A people so committed to immediate experience proved immune to the missionary — and ultimately converted him instead. Everett left the faith, at heavy cost to his family life, and told the whole story in his 2008 memoir Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, its title borrowed from a Pirahã way of saying goodnight in a jungle that discourages deep sleep. Whatever the final verdict on recursion, a community of a few hundred people on one Amazonian river has forced linguistics to confront its biggest question: how much of language is human nature — and how much is culture, all the way down.
Quiz nuggets
- Pirahã is spoken by a few hundred people on the Maici River in the Brazilian Amazon, and is the last survivor of the Mura language family.
- Its two quantity words, hói and hoí, differ mainly in tone and mean roughly 'a small amount' and 'a larger amount'.
- Daniel Everett arrived as a missionary in 1977; his 2008 memoir is titled Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes.
- Everett's 2005 paper argued that Pirahã lacks recursion, challenging Chomsky's view of a universal grammar.
- Peter Gordon's 2004 study in Science found Pirahã adults' quantity-matching broke down above two or three items.