ABSTRACT
When we compare people’s speech, we often find differences in vocabulary, in pronunciation, and in “grammar,” as well as differences in style and communicative clarity. Do these differences in linguistic performance reflect differences in linguistic competence? Differences in linguistic competence, that is, a speaker’s “knowledge” of the grammatical rules of a language, could come about in two ways. First, people could differ in terms of how well they had acquired the “correct” rules of their language. Second, people could differ with respect to the particular rules their particular languages have. But, as we noted in Chapter 5, we have not yet been able to specify fully the linguistic competence of young children, let alone that of adults. Our best guess, given what we know about language, is that differences among people in their levels of linguistic competence are either trivial or nonexistent. This conclusion applies to differences among people who speak the same language, as well as to differences among people who speak different languages. Hundreds of languages have been studied, yet no one has found a “primitive” language or a language that could be regarded as less complex or less effective than any other.
