Jacob Grimm, best known today as one of the Grimm Brothers of fairy tale fame, was in his own time a commanding figure in linguistics. In 1851, he addressed the Prussian Academy with a speech, “On the Origin of Language,” where he announced that no amount of study or research could ever bring us “to the secret” of the beginning of language. Language, he noted, was a gift from the divine, and whatever is divine in language is there “because the divine is indeed sprinkled throughout our nature and soul.” We would like to believe that we have come a long way from such speculations. But, as Christine Kenneally’s “The First Word” (Viking, 340 pages, $26.95) shows, the current search for the origin of language is as mired in imagination and presupposition as it was a century-and-a-half ago.

What lies at the basis of human communication? Is language unique to the human species? Did it evolve as an ancient adaptation to environment and circumstance, or did it arise as a side effect of other forms of intellectual and social evolution? These are the kinds of questions scientists are asking now. Experimental psychology, CT scan neurology, formal linguistics, and evolutionary biology have displaced the natural philosophy and literary criticism of the age of Grimm as the means of answering these questions. And yet for all of the lab-coated logic of our modern inquiries, there’s still the smoke of the ineffable hanging in the room. We simply want to be unique. If we don’t believe in God sprinkling his divinity among our clay anymore, we attribute that uniqueness to other things: something special in the brain, something distinctive about our vocal system, something unmatched in our social life.

“The First Word” sets out to review human uniqueness, but what it’s really interested in is the uniqueness of a certain set of humans. This is less a book about science than about scientists, less a history of ideas than a fable of personalities. Ms. Kenneally begins with chapter-length portraits of the lives and works of four figures central to current debates on the origin and nature of language: Noam Chomsky, the founder of modern linguistics; Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, who claims to have taught apes to understand and generate language; Steven Pinker, who with his collaborator Paul Bloom argues that language is a product of natural selection; and Philip Lieberman, who has studied the link between human language development and bodily motor control.

Ms. Kenneally offers some good distillations of these authors’ work, but most of her energies in these chapters are devoted to sketching vivid caricatures of the scientists themselves. Mr. Chomsky is rude, ill kempt, and self-important. Mr. Pinker is a well-organized genius. Mr. Lieberman comes from a Russian family of “idealists and fix-it types.” Ms. Savage-Rumbaugh emerges as a thoughtful researcher, struggling to find funding from suspicious institutions. Others pop up, sometimes as heroes — for example, Heidi Lyn, who works with dolphins at the University of St. Andrews — and sometimes as villains, most notably Stephen Jay Gould, “short and remarkably loud,” a teller of off-color jokes and an unprepared, dismissive public lecturer.

Ms. Kenneally’s true subject here is less academic scholarship than academic reputation. “Influence isn’t easy to define in academia,” she avers, and defining that influence is the goal of this book. Just how did Mr. Chomsky come to dominate linguistics? How did Mr. Pinker come to occupy his “airy, spacious, and clean” Harvard office? How did Gould become the secular saint of evolution? These are the kinds of questions motivating the book’s expositions, and Ms. Kenneally leaves the reader wondering just how anything gets done in universities at all.

If the people in “The First Word” are caricatures, the animals are characters. The apes, bonobos, parrots, and dolphins that speak and sign seem far more understanding, clever, caring, and cooperative than the rude, loud, short, quicktempered, competitive, and vulgar scientists. Ms. Kenneally’s sensitivity to these nonhuman subjects, and her detailed accounts of animal language research, are the great strengths of her book. But they also contribute to what may be an implicit, political argument. She is fascinated with the possibility that nonhuman species can be taught forms of language: that they have brains capable of complex cognition and that they have motor control that enables them to produce sounds and gestures that constitute sophisticated forms of communication.

Language may well not be unique to humans. Language may not be necessary for complex thought (though, as some of the researchers Ms. Kenneally reviews here suggest, language may texture, shape, or condition thought). She writes, breathlessly:

The more we learn about what’s going on in the heads of other animals, the more we realize that many different species have a lot to think about, and their ways of thinking are quite sophisticated. … We now know that it’s possible to have a complex inner and social life without syntax and words. … There can be no more easy assumptions about human uniqueness or the special status of our mental lives.

It is but a short step from these avowals to a claim for animal-rights advocacy, and I wonder if Ms. Kenneally is paving the way for a future, broader critique of how we use nonhuman subjects, not just in linguistic, but in medical, social, and cosmetic research.

Jacob Grimm and his contemporaries believed that language began in a mystery as great as creation itself, and human speech was but one element in that divinely sanctioned domination of man over beast. For Ms. Kenneally, the beasts are back, and if her book at times descends into glib anecdotes and offhand judgments, at its best — and at its most humane — it compels us to listen to what the animals are saying.

Mr. Lerer teaches at Stanford University and is the author of “Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language” (Columbia University Press).