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I just picked up Stephen Pinker's, "The Language Instinct" at the library yesterday. Very interesting reading, thus far.
Do you think language is innate or acquired?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Innate. Though I hope you'll list some things from the book; perhaps he has arguments for both? Technically, of course, it IS both: an infant of English-speaking parents isn't going to start talking in French! But the desire to communicate is innate: we are social animals. Once our brains develop sufficiently to discern and wonder about the world around us (usually by about 6 months), we demand interaction. (Prior to about 5 months old, even after good vision develops, infants are only truly "aware" of themselves, and that only in a rather amorphous way. They cry, yes, but in the earliest weeks are not capable of differentiating between, say, hunger and being too cold; all they "know" is that they're miserable in some way.) If somehow a group of 6-months-olds could be left completely on their own, I would predict that by 12 months at least some meaningful sounds would have developed and that by 18 months they would have a rudimentary vocal language of some kind. At least the equivalents of I'm hungry, I'm hurt, check this out, and hey, that's mine!
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The fact that there are thousands of languages seems to indicate that language is a spontaneous development.
Even other primates appear to have communication sounds that
qualify as language.
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Carpal Tunnel
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re:If somehow a group of 6-months-olds could be left completely on their own, I would predict that by 12 months at least some meaningful sounds would have developed and that by 18 months they would have a rudimentary vocal language of some kind. At least the equivalents of I'm hungry, I'm hurt, check this out, and hey, that's mine!
twins have been known to do it... most of them drop their private language by age 5, but there is a famous case of twins who persisited in 'speaking their own language well into their teens..
as they got older the vocabulary stole shamelessly from english, but the rules of 'grammar' differed, (but were rather consistant)
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idio glossia, I believe is the term. our twins just spoke English... 
formerly known as etaoin...
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Seems like a very interesting book, gh. Here's my two paise:
Speech is innate. Language as a tool of vocal/oral communication cannot develop without speech and is innate only in this reliance on speech as the stimulus. I would say that the language *instinct is therefore innate whilst language per se is acquired.
There was a lovely exchange on mynahs (dxb started it I think) just after I came here, and another that Jackie initiated on the neurbiology of language; you might want to read in the archives; Search is not working for me (!!??..that interrobang thing was created for me, don't know where to find it); I'd have posted the link otherwise.
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I've always liked the notion that we reinvent grammar every generation. It is learned without any formal training by somewhere around age two. Some people are better than others at relearning it at the prompting of the guardians of the earlier generations. I think this speaks for the innateness of grammar if not language per se.
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Good distinction, maahey. And Faldage, yes, what you're talking about would definitely fall under acquisition; that's precisely why I posed the idea of infants living on their own: they wouldn't have any examples to learn from. I hadn't really thought about grammar until I read your post (thank you); I think it would be fascinating, were it possible, to see what sort of grammar they developed! Maybe, "Hey! Mine that is!".
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I've heard it said, and have been unable to independently verify, that creoles tend to have remarkably similar grammars irrespective of their respective parent languages.
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I remember reading a study that showed that regardless of language, (2 of the many they looked at were English and Swahili) mothers tended to speak to their beginning-to-talk infants at a developemental level 1 stage ahead of the child's ability. If the child spoke in one word sentences eg "mine" then the mothers tend to respond with 2 word sentances eg "baby's ball". So not only the need to communicate and the ability to symbolize are innate but the ability to adjust communication is also innate.
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