The Walker and the Wake

This paper has two points of departure. The first is the use of marginal phenomena to elucidate complex core con-ceptual questions, an approach that has been used to good effect in a wide variety of disciplines.1 One such question is “What is language?,” where one not uncontroversial research program looks at animal behavior that arguably resembles hu-man communication (e.g., bee dances, whale songs).2 Another question—which we insist on distinguishing sharply from the former — is “What is a language?” By this we refer both to the determination of the place at which one language stops and an-other begins (e.g., Danish/Norwegian, Kazakh/Kyrgyz) and to the potential distinction between a language and a dialect (e.g., Hochdeutsch/Bairisch, Modern Standard Arabic/Maghrebi).3We confine ourselves to this latter question.