A guy that ' s been cooler than Anthony the past decade at least . Don ' t try to make him look like he is nobody . <| sep |> Steven Pinker , in his book ' The Language Instinct ', argues that grammar and structure of the language is to a certain degree inherent in humans . He contends that there ' s a single universal grammar underlying all languages and instinctive to everyone , with only a limited number of variations between them , that children up to a certain age can identify and adapt to by ' flipping mental switches '. After that , it ' s only a matter of building a vocabulary . It follows that children that grow up in multilingual environments only need to develop extra sets of ' switches positions ' and vocabularies , since the underlying grammar is always the same . This would mean that the extra cognitive load on their brains is significantly smaller than if they had to learn everything from scratch for each language . The book was published in 1994 , there are probably more recent theories on the subject .