A Short History of Language

Prehistory

It’s thought the universe we inhabit formed around 13.5 billion years ago, in an event known as the Big Bang. Matter and energy emerged, beginning physics. Atoms and molecules appeared, beginning chemistry. Around 4.5 billion years ago, the planet we now inhabit was formed, and about 3.8 billion years ago organisms emerged, beginning biology. Around 6 million years ago, the last common ancestor between chimpanzees and humans roamed the earth.

Then, around 2.5 million years ago, the genus Homo evolved in Africa, and stone tools began to be used for the first time. Humans then ventured to other parts of the world, arriving in Eurasia around 2 million years ago, at which point different species of humans began to evolve. Around 500,000 years ago, the human species Neanderthals emerged in Europe and what is euro-centrically called the ‘Middle East’, and about 300,000 years ago fire was being used. Though common consensus previously held that we, Homo sapiens, emerged in East Africa around 200,000 years ago, recent findings at Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, suggest we’ve been on this earth for anywhere between 280,000 and 350,000 years.

Homo sapiens, who we’ll just refer to as humans from here, began to successfully migrate outside of Africa around 80,000 years ago, and some believe that around the same period the use of language to tell stories began. About 60,000 years ago, humans arrived in Asia. Around 45,000 years ago, they reached Europe and Australia, whilst the last Neanderthals are thought to have become extinct about 30,000 years ago. Estimates vary, and new research is changing the picture all the time, but we can be fairly sure that humans arrived in what is now North and South America at least 19,000 and 13,000 years ago respectively. These are absolute minimums, and expanding research continues to mount the case that we’ve been in the Americas far longer. In fact, it’s best to take all of the dates mentioned in these paragraphs as mere markers. By the time you read this, the picture will almost certainly have changed.

About 12,000 years ago, something known as the Agricultural Revolution took place, as humans in certain parts of the world began transitioning to farming in place of hunting and gathering. Since around a similar time, we’ve been the only species of human left on earth. The first known kingdoms and writing systems appeared around 5,000 years ago, since which the story of humans, and indeed language, has been easier to follow.

Different forms of language

Languages can be verbal, non-verbal, and often both. Non-verbal communication is used widely by both humans and animals, but it was previously believed that only humans could use verbal language for communication.

Ιt has been proven in recent decades that some animals can communicate amongst each other with language beyond the use of gestures. Dogs bark, sniff, and move their ears to communicate, whilst dolphins use ultrasonic whistles. Great apes such as bonobos, gorillas, orang-utans, and chimpanzees even have a rudimentary verbal language, which researchers have found to contain as many as two hundred phonetic sequences - which vary from group to group within each individual species. For example, a group of bonobos from one region would not be able to understand the sounds of a group from another region.

Theories of language development

Though we currently have no way of knowing when or which group of people spoke the first words, there are various theories about the development of language.

In 1866, the Société de Linguistique de Paris banned the study of the evolution of languages, declaring it useless, despite the prevailing theory of evolution by natural selection, which had been put forward by Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin, with the latter publishing The Origin of Species by Natural Selection in 1859. Studying the development of languages from an evolutionary perspective suffered from this reputation until the 1980s, when researchers began to consider the development of language in light of the theory of natural selection.

This development was based on Evolutionary Game Theory - a theory traced to biologists in the early 1970s. Proponents of this theory argue that the language children acquire is an adaptation that allowed humans to negotiate and share knowledge, and thereby adapt to different environments.

In 1989, the linguist James Hurford used this theory to argue that one of the defining features of human language is that it is arbitrary, in so far as a community of speakers will agree to use a particular and arbitrary group of linguistic signs to refer to objects and concepts.

This argument was taken further by Michael Corballis, who in 2002 published From Hand to Mouth, where he asserted that human language began as gestures, before gradually developing into a form of verbal communication. Corballis argued that the evolutionary development of the locomotion of human legs left the hands available to make tools, move objects, and communicate with gestures.

If this theory is correct, the precursor to human language we see today was not based on sounds, but gestures. These gestures would at some point have been accompanied by sounds, such as small phonetic sequences or even whistles, which eventually turned into the phonemes (units of sound) that make up verbal human languages. Though there is much debate over the timescales involved, Corballis suggested this was a very slow process, begun more than two million years ago, when the genus Homo began making tools.

This goes against the theory that human language emerged with the evolution of Homo sapiens. In fact, this theory has been called into doubt by the research of recent decades, particularly because it essentially suggests that humans, as we are today, became so the moment we began to speak. José Barbosa Machado has pointed out the frivolity of this theory, noting we have no way of knowing when the first word was spoken - thus rendering it wild conjecture. The arguments put forward by Corballis, though also difficult or even impossible to prove, seem more sensible - even if the timescales are hard to pin down.

Some researchers estimate the first languages with similar grammatical structures to those found today can be traced back to around 40,000 years ago, though the evolutionary journey of these languages, as argued by Corballis, is sure to date back further.

Given the nature of the evidence, or rather the lack of it, areas of certainty are frequently reduced to the periods following the advent of human writing systems. As the first known written representations appeared in Sumer and Egypt around 5,000 years ago, this is the earliest date for which we can be sure of the existence of verbal language of the sort we use today. However, we can at the same time estimate that verbal language has been around longer - perhaps as long as 40,000 years ago, as mentioned above. The truth is, we simply don’t know.

The journey of languages

Although attaching precise dates to the evolution of human language is nigh on impossible, linguists have had more luck developing theories about the geographical spread of languages. There are still plenty of imprecisions, uncertainties, and contentious areas, but there have also been more patterns for researchers to piece together.

Some argue for linguistic polygenism - that human languages developed from several different areas around the world - whilst others extoll linguistic monogenism, which claims that all human languages stemmed from one language, long ago. In some respects, the difference between the two is not important, as they both arrive at the same conclusion, namely that languages are influenced by and develop according to the climate, geography, and lifestyle factors of a particular place.

The ‘mother language’ theory suggests the overwhelming majority, if not all, of verbal human languages developed from one language, a ‘mother language’ that existed around 100,000 to 70,000 years ago. Although the ‘mother language’ theory is controversial amongst linguists, it’s the most coherent and consistent theory available to explain the emergence of the array of human languages we see today. Founded on the work of linguists such as Alfredo Trombetti, more recent works by the likes of Merrit Ruhlen in 1994, and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza in 2000, have developed the theory further.

Though advocated by various linguists, the theory has a long history in myth and legend. The Hebrew Bible claims the creation of words was a power bestowed upon Adam by God. When descendants of those who survived the Great Flood built a tower tall enough to reach heaven - the Tower of Babel - God felt threatened. Seeking to curtail the power of these people, God confused their united language, and scattered them all over the world.

According to Aztec legend, a great flood left only two survivors - a man and woman who’d taken refuge in a hollowed-out tree. Their children were incapable of speech, until the day a dove flew by and taught each of them to speak in a different tongue. In Ancient Greece, Zeus was thought to reign over a monolingual land, until his son, Hermes, taught humans different languages.

Myths and legends aside, the theory has been gaining weight amongst linguistics since the eighteenth century. Central to the theory was the advent of isoglosses, which are demarcation lines drawn by linguists to geographically map linguistic features. Isoglosses have enabled linguists to gain a clearer idea of commonalities between languages. Some commonalities are mere coincidence, whilst others occur through the consistency of onomatopoeia - which can, for example, explain why a variation of ‘mama’ and ‘papa’ is so common in human languages, and why cats ‘meow’ in English and 喵 (miāo) in Chinese. Other coincidences are more random, such as the similarity between the Portuguese word for ‘who’ - quem - and the Kyrgyz equivalent, ким (kim).

Some coincidences are even broader in geographical scope. In the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, the word for ‘dog’ in the indigenous Chalcatongo Mixtec language is inà, bearing a striking resemblance to the Japanese equivalent, 犬 (inu) - although some linguists have pondered whether the connection between Japanese and certain indigenous languages of the Americas is more than a mere coincidence. One of the meanings of the German word Mann is ‘husband’ - a meaning shared by the term man in the indigenous Guajajara language of Brazil.

Language families

The use of isoglosses enabled linguists to begin delineating languages into families and subgroups. There are various explanations offered for how these families spread and developed, but the common theme is that languages evolve according to their surroundings, which of course include interactions with other groups of people and their languages. Together with long-term migration, it is possible to gain a sense of how different languages within the same family could have developed from common ancestors.

Though inadequate as a means of explaining language development, family trees are a useful tool for visualising the history of language families. The first person known to have applied family trees to languages was the German linguist August Schleicher, who first used the model in 1860. Schleicher called the model Stammbaum, the German term for a family or genealogical tree. Taken literally, the word would mean ‘tribe tree’ in English, as Stamm and Baum mean ‘tribe’ and ‘tree’ in German (though Stamm has various other meanings, including ‘trunk’ and ‘stem’). The term Stammbaum can also mean ‘pedigree’ in English, a word whose etymology can be traced to family trees. England is still ruled by the descendants of the Norman Conquest of 1066, and the conquerors spoke a form of what became French. The ruling class of England continued to speak this tongue until the late fourteenth century, and around a third of the vocabulary of English is thus believed to stem from French. This includes the word ‘pedigree’, which derives from pied-de-grue (crane’s foot) - the symbol denoting a line of succession on genealogical trees.

The language family encompassing the most speakers on the planet is Indo-European, with an estimated half of the world’s population speaking an Indo-European language as their first language, with many more speaking one as a second language. The discovery in the eighteenth century of commonalities between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin eventually led to the categorisation, as the linguistic demarcations were found to cover much of Europe, as well as languages in Iran and India.

Through the meticulous work of comparing the languages within this vast geographical zone, linguists were able to build a language family tree and come to a conclusion that’s central to how we understand the development of human language. Researchers believe the commonalities found across as broad a geographical spectrum of languages as Hindi, Russian, Italian, and German, suggest the existence of a hypothetical, long extinct language, which they named Proto-Indo-European - theorised to have been spoken between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago by communities living in Ukraine, southwest Russia, Georgia, and the Caucasus, before spreading across Eurasia.

The commonalities are in the structure of the languages, though there is also much shared basic vocabulary - the extent of which varies depending on the groups and subgroups. The most typical examples of common vocabulary, known as cognates, are perhaps the words for ‘mother’ and ‘father’, though there are others. For example, the beginning of the Sanskrit word for ‘foot’ is पद् (pad), whilst in Ancient Greek it is πούς (poús). The Latin for ‘foot’ is pes, whilst in Portuguese it is pé.

Another example is the third person singular of the present indicative of the verb ‘to be’ - basically the word ‘is’. In Sanskrit, Persian, and Latin, this is अस्ति (asti), است (ast), and est, whilst the Ancient Greek equivalent is also similar. In the subgroups of Latin, the word is either the same or similar, with French using est, Spanish es, Catalan és, Portuguese é, and Italian è.

Cognates, it is worth noting, are not the same as loan words - an example of which would be English and other languages’ adoption of the Italian word pizza, or the Chinese use of 麦克风 (màikèfēng), which is derived from ‘microphone’, just as the English language has borrowed ‘tofu’ from the Chinese word 豆腐 (dòufu).

There are more intricacies to the division and subdivision of language families, but the above is the general gist. The same attempts at linguistic mapping and categorisation have been done for language families throughout the world, such as Afro-Asiatic, Austronesian, Niger-Congo, and Sino-Tibetan.

Further Reading

Much of the above information on the origins of language is from José Barbosa Machado’s Introdução à História da Língua e Cultura Portuguesas.

There is still so much we don’t know about the evolution of language, but two of the most recent books on the subject worth reading seem to be Guy Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language, and David Shariatmadari’s Don’t Believe a Word.

For an update on recent research into prehistory, I'd recommend Tom Higham's The World Before Us.

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