Language in the Amerindian imagination: An inquiry into linguistic natures

- This special issue explores the multiple natures of language, differences in what language may be.
- The people whose language practices we study often have very different ideas of what these are.
- These cast doubt on the universality of language as general category of which particular languages are instances.
- In naturalist ontologies, language is one of the primary features said to set humans and nonhumans apart.
- In Amerindian ontologies, language is part of the original common condition and shared by humans and nonhumans.