INTRODUCTION

This book recounts a history of two sets of ideas. One set of ideas has at its centre the term ‘universal grammar’, a name enduringly applied in western linguistic tradition to the notion that human languages necessarily share important, formative, properties. The other set of ideas has at its centre an experience, namely the experience of acquisition of a second or foreign language. In the innumerable generations during which humans have participated in varieties of this experience, or observed others doing so, many people have been moved to speculate about its nature. These speculations – sometimes explicitly worked out as proposals about adult language learning, sometimes implicit in records of how languages have been learned and taught – form a second set of ideas, a history of which is recounted in this text. I am in particular interested in points of intersection between universal grammar and foreign language learning. From the ancient world up to around the sixteenth century, the focus is on Europe and the Mediterranean area. Since the 1500s, work historically rooted in Europe has been carried out in various parts of the world, so the geographical locus becomes more diffuse from that time up to the present day.