Steiner's teaching, from GA 306, that speech heard in early childhood flows into the body's finest tissues and physically forms the growing human being.
The Human Being as an Imprint of Language in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's teaching that the speech a young child hears does not stop at the ear but works formatively into the body itself. Steiner set it out in the second lecture of The Child's Changing Consciousness and Waldorf Education (GA 306), at Dornach on 16 April 1923, in German: Der Mensch ist ein Abdruck der Sprache. The child, unlike the animal, cannot hold sound at the surface. Gentle speech and shouted speech alike pass the coarser organs and settle into the structure of the finest tissues, so that the growing organism carries the shape of the language spoken around it. From this Steiner derives the differing bodily organizations of the various nations, and the claim that learning several languages makes a person more universal. Waldorf teachers apply it by treating their own spoken word as a bodily act of education.
The human being as an imprint of language is Steiner's account of how a child's body is built by what it hears. Between birth and the change of teeth the young child does not merely learn words. It takes the sound of the speech around it into its own formation, down into the finest tissues, and carries that shaping for life.
In Steiner's Own Words
The animal lets itself be shaped only by the larynx and its neighboring organs, but members of the human species allow vehement or passionate voices to enter their inner being. These sounds flow into the human form, right into the structure of the most delicate tissues. If children hear only gentle speech in their surroundings, this too flows right into the structure of their finest tissues. It flows into their very formation, and especially so into the more refined parts of their organization. The coarser parts are able to withstand these influences, as in the case of the animal. But whatever is taken in through speech flows into the finer parts of the child's organization. This is how the differing organizations of the various nations come about. They all flow out of the language spoken. The human being is an imprint of language.
What it Means Today
The closest modern counterpart sits in the infant speech laboratory of Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. In a 2003 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with Feng-Ming Tsao and Huei-Mei Liu, nine-month-old American infants were given a short run of Mandarin sessions. Those who sat with a live Mandarin speaker kept the ability to hear Mandarin sound contrasts that English-only babies lose by their first birthday. Those given the same material through video or audio recording learned nothing measurable. Kuhl calls the narrowing between six and twelve months native language neural commitment.
Thalira synthesis: Kuhl's live-speaker condition is the laboratory form of what Steiner meant by speech reaching the finest tissues, because in both accounts it is the presence of the speaker, not the acoustic signal alone, that does the forming.
This is the reasoning behind Waldorf early-childhood rooms, from the first school in Stuttgart in 1919 onward, being built around the teacher's own voice: daily verse, sung greeting, story told rather than read, recorded sound kept out. For a parent the consequence is specific: speak to the child in the room, not from a device.
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