Virtually all people acquire language as a part of their normal development. The predisposition to acquire language appears to be biogenetically transmitted. While the ability to acquire language is biologically transmitted, knowledge of a particular language is acquired through learning. The investigation of the way in which children acquire linguistic knowledge relates to this objective. Language is perhaps the most important element that has made the human type of adaptation as successful as it has been to date.
Human language allows for the highly efficient processing of complex bodies of information.
Internally, language enables complex thinking processes, although not all mental information processing is linguistic. Externally, language facilitates the development and dynamic maintenance of the complex types of social systems associated with the human condition. Anthropologists also have an interest in studying the relationship between language and culture as interacting symbolic systems and, more particularly, in investigating the world in which linguistic structure organizes a person's perceptions of the natural world. The study of the ways in which language mediates reality is called ethnolinguistics . Many anthropologists find themselves working among groups of people whose languages have never been described.