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Are Languages Alive?

2025-08-22 · explainer · Hank · 5:27 · watch on YouTube

Topic: History & curiosities (also: Personal life, Science & nature) · mode: Curiosity & trivia

Prompted by his child's remark about non-living things made of living things, Hank argues that language is neither clearly living nor non-living: it evolves by selection, lives in groups of human minds, drifts toward its own optimization, leaves fossils when it dies, and is the ultimate cultural replicator.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Hank's child's proclamation, family and language as non-living things made of living things; you are a living thing made of non-living parts

  • ★★ Hank's child proclaimed there are non-living things made of living things, like our bodies; Hank corrected it to living things made of non-living things. — 00:00:03
  • ★★ Hank told his child that a family might be a non-living thing made of living things, or perhaps just an idea in our heads. (hedged) — 00:00:20
  • ★★★ Hank asks whether language is a non-living thing made of living things, since it exists nowhere outside us except when written down. — 00:00:35
  • ★★ Hank tells the viewer that anyone who understands his sentence is a living thing made of atoms and molecules that would not be alive on their own. — 00:00:50

00:00:58 — The grade-school criteria for life; languages evolve by selection of words and sounds

  • ★★ Hank says languages are not living in the grade-school biology sense, a list of criteria such as having cells and evolving through natural selection. — 00:01:00
  • ★★★ Hank says languages kind of do evolve through selection: people choose their words and how to say them, preferring familiar structures and sounds and easy words. (hedged) — 00:01:10

00:01:27 — Howdy from 'how do you do'; why criteria-based definitions of life are a failure

  • ★★ Hank gives 'how do you do' turning into 'howdy' as an example of words changing to be easier to say. — 00:01:27 · howdy
  • ★ Hank says 'howdy' is hilarious, America's version of 'good day', and he loves saying it in other countries. (playful) — 00:01:30 · howdy, United States
  • ★★★ Hank has always felt the restrictive criteria-based definition of life is problematic: the criteria seem to exist to exclude anything that doesn't seem alive to us. — 00:01:40
  • ★★ Hank says a definition that can only preserve our perspective and never give us a new one is a failure of a definition. — 00:02:05
  • ★★ Hank says languages are self-sustaining; objecting that they need people is like saying life isn't self-sustaining without the Earth. — 00:02:15 · Earth

00:02:26 — Languages are self-sustaining in groups of humans, respond to stimuli and drift toward their own optimization, as life wants

  • ★★★ Hank says a language's environment is a human, or more properly a group of humans, since people don't have languages without others to talk to. — 00:02:30
  • ★★★ Hank says languages might even respond to stimuli, his own main criterion for life: he always says life wants. (hedged) — 00:02:40
  • ★★ Hank explains that single-celled organisms 'want' to be closer to light without knowing it, through systems that bring them toward what lets them exist longer. — 00:02:50
  • ★★ Hank says natural selection selects for this: a trait that lets something make more of itself becomes more common. — 00:03:00
  • ★★★ Hank says languages kind of want: through changing loan words and new inventions they drift toward being optimized for their own use, like an organism drifting to light. (hedged) — 00:03:04
  • ★★ Hank says the difference is that living things evolved to thrive in the world, while languages evolved to thrive in our minds and the connections between them. — 00:03:20

00:03:33 — Layperson caveat; extinct languages as fossils; language as the ultimate cultural replicator, neither living nor non-living

  • ★ Hank says he knows nothing about it, a layperson having fun, and asks groaning sociology PhDs to have fun with him. (playful) — 00:03:34
  • ★★★ Hank thinks we sense language as a living social technology because we talk about keeping a language alive or about languages that have gone extinct. — 00:03:45
  • ★★★ Hank says a written language we can no longer translate is like the language's bones lying dead in stone, a fossil of a dead thing, and dead implies once alive. — 00:04:03
  • ★★ Hank says these are metaphors, but the metaphors that work in language say something about reality. — 00:04:12
  • ★★ Hank says a language we can translate but no longer speak is a better fossil, with some flesh left, but still not alive. — 00:04:20
  • ★★★ Hank calls language the ultimate cultural replicator, the ultimate meme in Dawkins' original sense of the word. — 00:04:33
  • ★★ Hank suggests language may be even more fundamental than religion, though he is willing to lose that argument. (hedged) — 00:04:38
  • ★★★ Hank is as uncomfortable calling language non-living as calling it living, which leaves us creating new language for a thing made of living things that is kind of alive. — 00:04:45
  • ★★ Hank says whatever language is, it is very strange, probably one of the weirdest things that has ever happened, and he is doing it right now. — 00:05:00

00:05:08 — Sign-off and a riff repeating the word 'language' until it stops sounding like a word

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description adds that languages differ from life in not competing inside an ecosystem, or maybe a language is an ecosystem whose words compete and fall out of use. (speculative) — video description
  • ★★ The description wonders whether words rather than languages are alive, a language being a superorganism of words, but says it's probably best not to worry about it. (speculative) — video description

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: language · life

Also: Terms: howdy

Concepts: categorization · Fossil · Language change · language death · loanword adaptation · meme · metaphor · natural selection · religion

Places: Earth · United States

Products: Hot Wheels

Only in the description or credits: Richard Dawkins

Also centred on life: Google Is Alive! · Thoughts From the Universe - Woah · Nourished by Leaving · I Had a Hallucination This Week · Moon Joy

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