Abstract: Language is a unique and innate human ability that has played a crucial role in human evolution. However, whether human intelligence originated with the emergence of the ability to use linguistic symbols, and whether the human language ability is an innate faculty or a product of postnatal experience, are classic questions that have long been debated. Recently, breakthroughs in natural language processing technologies, represented by large language models and multimodal large models, have prompted a re-examination of the importance of language to general intelligence. By reviewing the role of language in human intelligence and artificial intelligence and the commonalities between the two, this article discusses the feasibility of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) with language processing at its core, and further argues for the plausibility of linguistic nativism in explaining human language. The article proposes that the emergence of language ability may constitute the singularity for the realization of general intelligence.