Language: the cultural tool .

The study of language in relation to anthropological questions has deep and varied roots, from H umboldt and B oas, M alinowski and V ygotsky, S apir and W horf, W ittgenstein and A ustin, through to the linguistic anthropologists of now. A recent book by the linguist D aniel E verett, Language: the cultural tool (2012), aims to bring some of the issues to a popular audience, with a focus on the idea that language is a tool for social action. I argue in this essay that the book does not represent the state of the art in this field, falling short on three central desiderata of a good account for the social functions of language and its relation to culture. I frame these desiderata in terms of three questions, here termed the cognition question, the causality question, and the culture question. I look at the relevance of this work for socio‐cultural anthropology, in the context of a major interdisciplinary pendulum swing that is incipient in the study of language today, a swing away from formalist, innatist perspectives, and towards functionalist, empiricist perspectives. The role of human diversity and culture is foregrounded in all of this work. To that extent, E verett's book is representative, but the quality of his argument is neither strong in itself nor representative of a movement that ought to be of special interest to socio‐cultural anthropologists.