 The “I-” in “I-language” is short, not for “idiolectal”, but for a cluster words that connote an idiolectal approach and coincidentally begin with the same letter, especially “internal” and  “individualistic”.[3]  “E-language” is used critically by Chomsky to refer to those things, whatever they are, that are the target of study for those who take languages and their properties to be external to the mind. This includes many philosophers of language. Chomsky’s case for introducing and using the notion of an I-language is, in the end, indistinguishable from his case for a cognitivist approach to the study of language as a natural phenomenon. And his case against E-languages is that there is no scientifically coherent project to which they belong as posits.