Do you think that the acquisition of language is genetics?

[jeancrowley]

For example it's easier for a british to learn english as compared to an asian disregarding environmental conditions

[Hutch Hogan]

Depends on the environmental conditions.  Mostly the language the mother speaks while the child is in the womb as far as I understand. 

[Abreo]

Definitely not. Language changes too quickly for evolutionary adaptations to make sense at all, and people of different races aren't different enough for this to make sense.

[CD]

There's this concept called 'babbling'.  Every infant in the world with the requisite body parts does it, and it's a developmental milestone that occurs before speech.   The infant babbles every phoneme in the entire human lexicon, not just the ones their immediate social group speaks.

But as the baby learns more words and phrases from their social group, they selectively stop using the phonemes that aren't spoken by their environment. 

Wallah.

Is it genetics?  Maybe - TRV2  or TPV2 I think is the name of the gene that encodes language.  Neandertals had it too and probably so did Denisovans.

Do other primates?  Nope.   But there are distant relatives that can recognise graphical language - tell the difference between fake and made up words anyway.

It's a complex topic.

[Trevelyan]

No, absolutely not. Child language acquisition is a really complex, interesting process, but race has little or nothing to do with it.

[Kyle Madigan]

I don't know if it's primarily genetic, but I know that kids who are exposed to more languages in their developing years, when their bodies and brain capacity are growing at an astronomical rate, are much better at learning languages. That's why kids who live in, say, a home where the parents are fluent in both English and Spanish interchangeably are bilingual, but millions of high school kids need to take 4 years of Spanish to learn how to communicate with them.  

[Marilla]

No. language, like all culture, is acquired through the environment in which the child is raised. for instance, it's just as easy for an infant adopted from china to learn english as it is for an american baby. 

[Lori S.]

Right.  And, a third-generation Chinese-American won't have any less facility with the English language, on average, than a tenth-generation American of British ancestry.

[Nicole Trist]

Babies just babble, and occasionally they come across a sound that we all cheer, such as "Mumma" or "Dadda". So they repeat the sounds we applaud them for and that is how they begin their speech.. Language is purely environmental... It is just like different areas in the one country may all use english, for example, but have different dialects. I know that I have a different accent and different vocabularly to people who live just a few kilometres away, and that is not genetic, it is just because human nature is to mimic those around us.

[spiderboenz]

Well, seeing as how my adopted Chinese cousin learned English at the same speed as my non-adopted American niece (same age) I'm going to say that there is no genetic basis for language acquisition.