Noam Chomsky is a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historical writer, social critic and

political activist from the United States. Chomsky is known as the “father of linguistics” and
is a key figure in philosophy. Linguistics can be defined as the study of language and its
structure.
Chomsky believed that we are born with a predisposition to learn language. ie, language
acquisition is natural or innate, which is not developed). The essence of his theory of
language acquisition state that human beings are pre-wired to learn language and in fact are
born with the basic rules for language intact. He says that human brain is ready made to
quickly acquire language at specific stages of developmental process. But prior to Chomsky,
it was widely believed that language acquisition was mostly a learned process, which were
developed solely through our parents and others in our environment.

He also proposed theory of universal grammar. Here he states that all languages have formal
principles in common, with specific options and limits for variations. That means, all
languages use nouns, verbs and adjectives to convey messages.

The essay is a review and rethinking of the leading themes of the biolinguistics program
since its inception in the early 1950s. it discusses how these themes have been influenced
by developments in the biological sciences.
The program explores the relationship between language and the mind.

• It involves the evolution of language and the properties of the brain that relates to it.
• It considers how internal language is used for reasoning, interpretation and for other
mental acts.
• And also, how human language is different from that of animal language.

He says that he has been exploring different ways to tackle this project. He decided the best
approach would be to revisit some key ideas from the early days of biolinguistics (the study
of language and biology), which started in the 1950s. He showed how new research
questions naturally connect to those early ideas.
The term "biolinguistics" was actually invented by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini in 1974. He
organized a conference that brought together experts from biology, neuroscience, linguistics,
and other fields to discuss language and biology. This wasn't the only event like this –
Massimo also mentioned another conference called Royaumont.
The Royaumont Conference on Experimental Social Psychology was a series of three conferences
held in Royaumont Abbey in France in 1961, 1963, and 1965. They were instrumental in the
development of European social psychology as a distinct field.

Back in the 1950s, everyone was interested in how people learn and behave. B.F. Skinner
wrote a famous book called "Verbal Behavior" (1957) that explained how language works
like any other learned behavior. This idea became super popular, especially in places like
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Even other smart thinkers like W.V. Quine agreed with these
ideas in his book "Word and Object" (1960). Everyone just assumed, that this explained
everything about what humans can do and how different cultures are.
Back in the 1950s, a book called "Methods of structural linguistics" by Zellig Harris (1951)
came out. It explained how to analyze spoken language, from sounds to sentences, and
organize it all neatly. Most linguists in America figured that, this was all you could really do
with language studies – there wasn't much room for any grand theories. This attitude
stemmed from the idea that languages could be totally different from each other in
unpredictable ways, so you couldn't apply one "right" theory to all of them. Every language
had to be studied fresh, without any preconceived notions. This was kind of the standard
thinking, influenced by linguist Franz Boas. It was similar to biology back then, where
scientists thought that there were just too many unique life forms to neatly categorize them
all under one theory.