Overhearing talk on trains, in the supermarket etc. suggests to me that language is overwhelmingly used in gossip, particularly to bond two people together by confirming their joint opinion (usually negative) of someone else not present, either known personally or a public figure. It is not about transferring information or giving orders or warnings or the other things that some hypotheses of the evolution of language suggest that it should be about. Of course, language might have been co-opted for uses other than its original one (we did not evolve opposable thumbs to play Nintendo). But are there systematic studies of what people actually use language for outside the lab.?
