In this chapter, I am going to show that our account of numbers and counting words provides the grounds for a new perspective on the relationship between language and the emergence of numerical thinking in the history of our species. In particular I am going to show that the contribution of language does not end with giving us counting sequences as numerical tools. I will argue that language not only provides us with access to a number sequence, but that it is the human language faculty that enabled us to develop a fully-fledged, systematic number concept in the first place.

Crucially, such a concept enables us to employ numbers – or rather, ‘numerical tools’ – in a pattern of dependent linking: we can use them to identify empirical properties (like cardinality, rank, or identity) because of the relations they have with other numbers, that is, because of their position within a numerical system and not because they have these properties as individuals in their own standing. In short: it is the system that makes numbers. In the present chapter I am going to show that it is our linguistic capacity that enables us to grasp numbers the way we do: language as a mental faculty laid the grounds for the emergence of a systematic concept of number, a concept of number that builds on a pattern of dependent linking and covers the different numerical relational structures we use in number assignments and mathematical reasoning.