Language in the Amerindian imagination: An inquiry into linguistic natures.

Highlights • 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]