How to Learn to Talk

Child Language Acquisition and Learning You're Not the Only Person with Questions

In order to learn how to speak, we first have to forget how to speak.

When a child is born they have the capacity to produce any sound: the famous clicks of Xhosa, the gutturals of Arabic, the alveolar and uvular trills of French. They can learn any language, languages that feel strange and near-impossible to an adult native English speaker. There are languages spoken in Australia that employ only cardinal directions, so that a speaker might say something like “I hurt my north leg” rather than “I hurt my left leg.” There are many languages with case systems, in which a noun is conjugated depending on whether it is subject, or object, or something altogether different (Old English had such a system, though it’s long-gone. Old English also had a system of grammatical gender, with three genders, also long-gone). And there are languages with tenses used specifically to refer to historical events, or events taking place at certain times of day.

When we are born we have no language at all. We are as likely to speak Navajo, widely considered the hardest language in the world, as we are to speak Turkish, widely considered one of the easiest. We are without identity. They are all equally hard and equally easy. We are plastic. We have no voice and, therefore, every voice.