The origin of language (spoken and signed, as well as language-related technological systems such as writing), its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries. Scholars wishing to study the origins of language must draw inferences from evidence such as the
fossil record
A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved in ...
, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of
language acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use words and sentences to ...
, and comparisons between human
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
and systems of communication existing
among animals (particularly
other primates). Many argue that the origins of language probably relate closely to the origins of
modern human behavior
Behavioral modernity is a suite of behavioral and cognitive traits that distinguishes current ''Homo sapiens'' from other anatomically modern humans, hominins, and primates. Most scholars agree that modern human behavior can be characterized b ...
, but there is little agreement about the facts and implications of this connection.
The shortage of direct,
empirical evidence
Empirical evidence for a proposition is evidence, i.e. what supports or counters this proposition, that is constituted by or accessible to sense experience or experimental procedure. Empirical evidence is of central importance to the sciences and ...
has caused many scholars to regard the entire topic as unsuitable for serious study; in 1866, the
Linguistic Society of Paris banned any existing or future debates on the subject, a prohibition which remained influential across much of the Western world until late in the twentieth century. Various hypotheses have been developed about how, why, when, and where language might have emerged.
Still, little more has been universally agreed upon today (as of 1996) than over a century and a half ago, when
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin ( ; 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended fr ...
's
theory of evolution
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation t ...
by
natural selection
Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the heritable traits characteristic of a population over generations. Charle ...
provoked a surge of speculation on the topic. Since the early 1990s, however, a number of
linguist
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
s,
archaeologist
Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscap ...
s,
psychologist
A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior. Their work often involves the experimentation, observation, and interpretation of how indi ...
s,
anthropologist
An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and ...
s, and others have attempted to address this issue with new, modern methods.
Approaches
The origin of language can be sub-divided according to some underlying assumptions:
* "Continuity theories" build on the idea that language exhibits so much complexity that one cannot imagine it simply appearing from nothing in its final form; therefore it must have evolved from earlier pre-linguistic systems among humans' primate ancestors.
* "Discontinuity theories" take the opposite approach—that language, as a unique trait which cannot be compared to anything found among non-humans, must have appeared fairly suddenly during the course of
human evolution
Human evolution is the evolutionary process within the history of primates that led to the emergence of ''Homo sapiens'' as a distinct species of the hominid family, which includes the great apes. This process involved the gradual development of ...
.
* Some theories consider language mostly as an innate faculty—largely genetically encoded.
* Other theories regard language as a mainly
cultural
Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human Society, societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, and habits of the ...
system—learned through social interaction.
A majority of linguistic scholars favour continuity-based theories, but they vary in how they hypothesize language development. Among those who consider language as mostly innate, some avoid speculating about specific precursors in nonhuman primates, stressing simply that the language faculty must have evolved in the usual gradual way.
[
] Others in this intellectual camp—notably Ib Ulbæk
—hold that language evolved not from primate communication but from primate cognition, which is significantly more complex.
Those who consider language as learned socially, such as
Michael Tomasello
Michael Tomasello (born January 18, 1950) is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as a linguist. He is professor of psychology at Duke University.
Earning many prizes and awards from the end of the 1990s onward, he is c ...
, consider it developing from the cognitively controlled aspects of primate communication, these being mostly gestural as opposed to vocal.
Where vocal precursors are concerned, many continuity theorists envisage language evolving from early human capacities for song.
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is ...
, a proponent of discontinuity theory, argues that a single chance mutation occurred in one individual in the order of 100,000 years ago, installing the language faculty (a
hypothetical component of the mid-brain) in "perfect" or "near-perfect" form.
Transcending the continuity-versus-discontinuity divide, some scholars view the emergence of language as the consequence of some kind of social transformation
that, by generating unprecedented levels of public trust, liberated a genetic potential for linguistic creativity that had previously lain dormant.
"Ritual/speech coevolution theory" exemplifies this approach.
Scholars in this intellectual camp point to the fact that even
chimpanzees
The chimpanzee (''Pan troglodytes''), also known as simply the chimp, is a species of great ape native to the forest and savannah of tropical Africa. It has four confirmed subspecies and a fifth proposed subspecies. When its close relative the ...
and
bonobo
The bonobo (; ''Pan paniscus''), also historically called the pygmy chimpanzee and less often the dwarf chimpanzee or gracile chimpanzee, is an endangered great ape and one of the two species making up the genus '' Pan,'' the other being the comm ...
s have latent symbolic capacities that they rarely—if ever—use in the wild.
Objecting to the sudden mutation idea, these authors argue that even if a chance mutation were to install a language organ in an evolving bipedal primate, it would be adaptively useless under all known primate social conditions. A very specific social structure—one capable of upholding unusually high levels of public accountability and trust—must have evolved before or concurrently with language to make reliance on "cheap signals" (words) an
evolutionarily stable strategy
An evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) is a strategy (or set of strategies) that is ''impermeable'' when adopted by a population in adaptation to a specific environment, that is to say it cannot be displaced by an alternative strategy (or set of ...
.
Since the emergence of language lies so far back in
human prehistory
Prehistory, also known as pre-literary history, is the period of human history between the use of the first stone tools by hominins 3.3 million years ago and the beginning of recorded history with the invention of writing systems. The use of ...
, the relevant developments have left no direct historical traces; neither can comparable processes be observed today. Despite this, the emergence of new sign languages in modern times—
Nicaraguan Sign Language
Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN; es, Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua) is a form of sign language which developed spontaneously among deaf children in a number of schools in Nicaragua in the 1980s. It is of particular interest to linguists as it off ...
, for example—may potentially offer insights into the developmental stages and creative processes necessarily involved. Another approach inspects early human fossils, looking for traces of physical adaptation to language use.
In some cases, when the
DNA of extinct humans can be recovered, the presence or absence of genes considered to be language-relevant—
FOXP2
Forkhead box protein P2 (FOXP2) is a protein that, in humans, is encoded by the ''FOXP2'' gene. FOXP2 is a member of the forkhead box family of transcription factors, proteins that regulate gene expression by binding to DNA. It is expressed in ...
, for example—may prove informative.
Another approach, this time archaeological, involves invoking
symbolic behavior (such as repeated ritual activity) that may leave an archaeological trace—such as mining and modifying ochre pigments for
body-painting
Body painting is a form of body art where artwork is painted directly onto the human skin. Unlike tattoos and other forms of body art, body painting is temporary, lasting several hours or sometimes up to a few weeks (in the case of mehndi or "h ...
—while developing theoretical arguments to justify inferences from
symbol
A symbol is a mark, sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, object, or relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by creating linkages between otherwise very different conc ...
ism in general to language in particular.
The time range for the evolution of language or its anatomical prerequisites extends, at least in principle, from the phylogenetic divergence of ''
Homo
''Homo'' () is the genus that emerged in the (otherwise extinct) genus ''Australopithecus'' that encompasses the extant species ''Homo sapiens'' ( modern humans), plus several extinct species classified as either ancestral to or closely relate ...
'' (2.3 to 2.4 million years ago) from ''
Pan'' (5 to 6 million years ago) to the emergence of full
behavioral modernity
Behavioral modernity is a suite of behavioral and cognitive traits that distinguishes current ''Homo sapiens'' from other anatomically modern humans, hominins, and primates. Most scholars agree that modern human behavior can be characterized by ...
some 50,000–150,000 years ago. Few dispute that ''
Australopithecus
''Australopithecus'' (, ; ) is a genus of early hominins that existed in Africa during the Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene. The genus ''Homo'' (which includes modern humans) emerged within ''Australopithecus'', as sister to e.g. ''Australopi ...
'' probably lacked vocal communication significantly more sophisticated than that of
great ape
The Hominidae (), whose members are known as the great apes or hominids (), are a taxonomic family of primates that includes eight extant species in four genera: '' Pongo'' (the Bornean, Sumatran and Tapanuli orangutan); ''Gorilla'' (the east ...
s in general,
but scholarly opinions vary as to the developments since the appearance of ''
Homo
''Homo'' () is the genus that emerged in the (otherwise extinct) genus ''Australopithecus'' that encompasses the extant species ''Homo sapiens'' ( modern humans), plus several extinct species classified as either ancestral to or closely relate ...
'' some 2.5 million years ago. Some scholars assume the development of primitive language-like systems (''proto-language'') as early as ''
Homo habilis
''Homo habilis'' ("handy man") is an extinct species of archaic human from the Early Pleistocene of East and South Africa about 2.31 million years ago to 1.65 million years ago (mya). Upon species description in 1964, ''H. habilis'' was highly ...
'', while others place the development of
symbolic communication Symbolic communication is the exchange of messages that change ''a priori'' expectation of events. Examples of this are modern communication technology and the exchange of information amongst animals.
By referring to objects and ideas not present at ...
only with ''
Homo erectus
''Homo erectus'' (; meaning "upright man") is an extinct species of archaic human from the Pleistocene, with its earliest occurrence about 2 million years ago. Several human species, such as '' H. heidelbergensis'' and '' H. antecessor' ...
'' (1.8 million years ago) or with ''
Homo heidelbergensis
''Homo heidelbergensis'' (also ''H. sapiens heidelbergensis''), sometimes called Heidelbergs, is an extinct species or subspecies of archaic human which existed during the Middle Pleistocene. It was subsumed as a subspecies of ''H. erectus'' in ...
'' (0.6 million years ago) and the development of language proper with ''
Homo sapiens
Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, ...
'', currently estimated at less than 200,000 years ago.
Using statistical methods to estimate the time required to achieve the current spread and diversity in modern languages,
Johanna Nichols
Johanna Nichols (born 1945, Iowa City, Iowa) is an American linguist and professor emerita in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of C ...
—a linguist at the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
—argued in 1998 that vocal languages must have begun diversifying in the human species at least 100,000 years ago. A further study by Q. D. Atkinson
suggests that successive population bottlenecks occurred as human African ancestors migrated to other areas, leading to a decrease in genetic and phenotypic diversity. Atkinson argues that these bottlenecks also affected culture and language, suggesting that the farther away a particular language is from Africa, the fewer
phonemes
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
it contains. By way of evidence, Atkinson claims that today's African languages tend to have relatively large numbers of phonemes, whereas languages of
Oceania
Oceania (, , ) is a region, geographical region that includes Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Spanning the Eastern Hemisphere, Eastern and Western Hemisphere, Western hemispheres, Oceania is estimated to have a land area of ...
(the last region to be populated by humans) have relatively few. Relying heavily on Atkinson's work, a subsequent study has explored the rate at which phonemes develop naturally, comparing this rate to some of Africa's oldest languages. The results suggest that language first evolved around 50,000–150,000 years ago, which is around the time when modern ''Homo sapiens'' evolved.
Estimates of this kind are not universally accepted, but jointly considering genetic, archaeological, palaeontological, and much other evidence indicates that language probably emerged somewhere in
sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa is, geographically, the area and regions of the continent of Africa that lies south of the Sahara. These include West Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, and Southern Africa. Geopolitically, in addition to the List of sov ...
during the
Middle Stone Age
The Middle Stone Age (or MSA) was a period of African prehistory between the Early Stone Age and the Late Stone Age. It is generally considered to have begun around 280,000 years ago and ended around 50–25,000 years ago. The beginnings of pa ...
, roughly contemporaneous with the speciation of ''Homo sapiens''.
[
]
Language origin hypotheses
Early speculations
In 1861, historical linguist
Max Müller
Friedrich Max Müller (; 6 December 1823 – 28 October 1900) was a German-born philologist and Orientalist, who lived and studied in Britain for most of his life. He was one of the founders of the western academic disciplines of Indian ...
published a list of speculative theories concerning the origins of spoken language:
* ''Bow-wow''. The ''bow-wow'' or ''cuckoo'' theory, which Müller attributed to the German philosopher
Johann Gottfried Herder
Johann Gottfried von Herder ( , ; 25 August 174418 December 1803) was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the Enlightenment, ''Sturm und Drang'', and Weimar Classicism.
Biography
Born in Mohrun ...
, saw early words as imitations of the cries of beasts and birds.
* ''Pooh-pooh''. The ''pooh-pooh'' theory saw the
first words as emotional interjections and exclamations triggered by pain, pleasure, surprise, etc.
* ''Ding-dong''. Müller suggested what he called the ''ding-dong'' theory, which states that all things have a vibrating natural resonance, echoed somehow by man in his earliest words.
* ''Yo-he-ho''. The ''yo-he-ho'' theory claims language emerged from collective rhythmic labor, the attempt to synchronize muscular effort resulting in sounds such as ''heave'' alternating with sounds such as ''ho''.
* ''Ta-ta''. This did not feature in Max Müller's list, having been proposed in 1930 by Sir Richard Paget. According to the ''ta-ta'' theory, humans made the earliest words by tongue movements that mimicked manual gestures, rendering them audible.
Most scholars today consider all such theories not so much wrong—they occasionally offer peripheral insights—as naïve and irrelevant. The problem with these theories is that they are so narrowly mechanistic. They assume that once human ancestors had discovered the appropriate ingenious ''mechanism'' for linking sounds with meanings, language automatically evolved.
Medieval Muslim scholars also developed theories on the origin of language. Their theories were of five general types:
# ''Naturalist'': There is a natural relation between expressions and the things they signify. Language thus emerged from a natural human inclination to imitate the sounds of nature.
# ''Conventionalist'': Language is a social convention. The names of things are arbitrary inventions of humans.
# ''Revelationist'': Language was gifted to humans by
God
In monotheism, monotheistic thought, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator deity, creator, and principal object of Faith#Religious views, faith.Richard Swinburne, Swinburne, R.G. "God" in Ted Honderich, Honderich, Ted. (ed)''The Ox ...
, and it was thus God—and not humans—who named everything.
# ''Revelationist-Conventionalist'': God revealed to humans a core base of language—enabling humans to communicate with each other—and then humans invented the rest of language.
# ''Non-Committal'': The view that conventionalist and revelationist theories are equally plausible.
Problems of reliability and deception
From the perspective of signalling theory, the main obstacle to the evolution of language-like communication in nature is not a mechanistic one. Rather, it is the fact that symbols—arbitrary associations of sounds or other perceptible forms with corresponding meanings—are unreliable and may well be false.
As the saying goes, "words are cheap".
The problem of reliability was not recognized at all by Darwin, Müller or the other early evolutionary theorists.
Animal vocal signals are, for the most part, intrinsically reliable. When a cat purrs, the signal constitutes direct evidence of the animal's contented state. The signal is trusted, not because the cat is inclined to be honest, but because it just cannot fake that sound. Primate vocal calls may be slightly more manipulable, but they remain reliable for the same reason—because they are hard to fake.
Primate social intelligence is "
Machiavellian
Machiavellianism or Machiavellian may refer to:
Politics
*Machiavellianism (politics), the supposed political philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli
*Political realism
Psychology
*Machiavellianism (psychology), a personality trait centered on cold an ...
"—self-serving and unconstrained by moral scruples. Monkeys and apes often attempt to deceive each other, while at the same time remaining constantly on guard against falling victim to deception themselves.
Paradoxically, it is theorized that primates' resistance to deception is what blocks the evolution of their signalling systems along language-like lines. Language is ruled out because the best way to guard against being deceived is to ignore all signals except those that are instantly verifiable. Words automatically fail this test.
Words are easy to fake. Should they turn out to be lies, listeners will adapt by ignoring them in favor of hard-to-fake indices or cues. For language to work, then, listeners must be confident that those with whom they are on speaking terms are generally likely to be honest.
A peculiar feature of language is "
displaced reference", which means reference to topics outside the currently perceptible situation. This property prevents utterances from being corroborated in the immediate "here" and "now". For this reason, language presupposes relatively high levels of mutual trust in order to become established over time as an
evolutionarily stable strategy
An evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) is a strategy (or set of strategies) that is ''impermeable'' when adopted by a population in adaptation to a specific environment, that is to say it cannot be displaced by an alternative strategy (or set of ...
. This stability is born of a longstanding mutual trust and is what grants language its authority. A theory of the origins of language must therefore explain why humans could begin trusting cheap signals in ways that other animals apparently cannot (see
signalling theory
Within evolutionary biology, signalling theory is a body of theoretical work examining communication between individuals, both within species and across species. The central question is when organisms with conflicting interests, such as in sex ...
).
The "mother tongues" hypothesis
The "mother tongues" hypothesis was proposed in 2004 as a possible solution to this problem.
W. Tecumseh Fitch
William Tecumseh Sherman Fitch III (born 1963)http://homepage.univie.ac.at/tecumseh.fitch/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/FitchCV2011.pdf is an American evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Vienna (Vienna, Austria) where ...
suggested that the Darwinian principle of "
kin selection
Kin selection is the evolutionary strategy that favours the reproductive success of an organism's relatives, even when at a cost to the organism's own survival and reproduction. Kin altruism can look like Altruism in animals, altruistic behavio ...
"—the convergence of genetic interests between relatives—might be part of the answer. Fitch suggests that languages were originally "mother tongues". If language evolved initially for communication between mothers and their own biological offspring, extending later to include adult relatives as well, the interests of speakers and listeners would have tended to coincide. Fitch argues that shared genetic interests would have led to sufficient trust and cooperation for intrinsically unreliable signals—words—to become accepted as trustworthy and so begin evolving for the first time.
Critics of this theory point out that kin selection is not unique to humans.
So even if one accepts Fitch's initial premises, the extension of the posited "mother tongue" networks from close relatives to more distant relatives remains unexplained.
Fitch argues, however, that the extended period of physical immaturity of human infants and the postnatal growth of the human brain give the human-infant relationship a different and more extended period of intergenerational dependency than that found in any other species.
The "obligatory reciprocal altruism" hypothesis
Ib Ulbæk
invokes another standard Darwinian principle—"
reciprocal altruism
In evolutionary biology, reciprocal altruism is a behaviour whereby an organism acts in a manner that temporarily reduces its fitness while increasing another organism's fitness, with the expectation that the other organism will act in a similar m ...
"—to explain the unusually high levels of intentional honesty necessary for language to evolve. "Reciprocal altruism" can be expressed as the principle that ''if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours''. In linguistic terms, it would mean that ''if you speak truthfully to me, I'll speak truthfully to you''. Ordinary Darwinian reciprocal altruism, Ulbæk points out, is a relationship established between frequently interacting individuals. For language to prevail across an entire community, however, the necessary reciprocity would have needed to be enforced universally instead of being left to individual choice. Ulbæk concludes that for language to evolve, society as a whole must have been subject to moral regulation.
Critics point out that this theory fails to explain when, how, why or by whom "obligatory reciprocal altruism" could possibly have been enforced.
Various proposals have been offered to remedy this defect.
A further criticism is that language does not work on the basis of reciprocal altruism anyway. Humans in conversational groups do not withhold information to all except listeners likely to offer valuable information in return. On the contrary, they seem to want to
advertise to the world their access to socially relevant information, broadcasting that information without expectation of reciprocity to anyone who will listen.
The gossip and grooming hypothesis
Gossip, according to
Robin Dunbar
Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar (born 28 June 1947) is a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist and a specialist in primate behaviour. He is currently head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department ...
in his book ''
Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language'', does for group-living humans what
manual grooming does for other primates—it allows individuals to service their relationships and so maintain their alliances on the basis of the principle: ''if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours''. Dunbar argues that as humans began living in increasingly larger social groups, the task of manually grooming all one's friends and acquaintances became so time-consuming as to be unaffordable.
In response to this problem, humans developed "a cheap and ultra-efficient form of grooming"—''vocal grooming''. To keep allies happy, one now needs only to "groom" them with low-cost vocal sounds, servicing multiple allies simultaneously while keeping both hands free for other tasks. Vocal grooming then evolved gradually into vocal language—initially in the form of "gossip".
Dunbar's hypothesis seems to be supported by the fact that the structure of language shows adaptations to the function of narration in general.
Critics of this theory point out that the very efficiency of "vocal grooming"—the fact that words are so cheap—would have undermined its capacity to signal commitment of the kind conveyed by time-consuming and costly manual grooming. A further criticism is that the theory does nothing to explain the crucial transition from vocal grooming—the production of pleasing but meaningless sounds—to the cognitive complexities of syntactical speech.
Ritual/speech coevolution
The ritual/speech coevolution theory was originally proposed by social anthropologist
Roy Rappaport
Roy A. Rappaport (1926–1997) was an American anthropologist known for his contributions to the anthropological study of ritual and to ecological anthropology.
Biography
Rappaport received his Ph.D. at Columbia University and held a tenured posi ...
before being elaborated by anthropologists such as Chris Knight,
Jerome Lewis,
Nick Enfield,
Camilla Power
and Ian Watts.
Cognitive scientist and robotics engineer
Luc Steels is another prominent supporter of this general approach, as is biological anthropologist and neuroscientist
Terrence Deacon
Terrence William Deacon (born 1950) is an American neuroanthropologist (Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology, Harvard University 1984). He taught at Harvard for eight years, relocated to Boston University in 1992, and is currently Professor of Anth ...
.
These scholars argue that there can be no such thing as a "theory of the origins of language". This is because language is not a separate adaptation but an internal aspect of something much wider—namely, human
symbolic culture Symbolic culture, or nonmaterial culture, is the ability to learn and transmit behavioral traditions from one generation to the next by the invention of things that exist entirely in the symbolic realm. Symbolic culture is usually conceived as the c ...
as a whole.
Attempts to explain language independently of this wider context have failed, say these scientists, because they are addressing a problem with no solution. Language would not work outside a specific array of social mechanisms and institutions. For example, it would not work for a nonhuman ape communicating with others in the wild. Not even the cleverest nonhuman ape could make language work under such conditions.
Advocates of this school of thought point out that words are cheap. Should an especially clever nonhuman ape, or even a group of articulate nonhuman apes, try to use words in the wild, they would carry no conviction. The primate vocalizations that do carry conviction—those they actually use—are unlike words, in that they are emotionally expressive, intrinsically meaningful, and reliable because they are relatively costly and hard to fake.
Language consists of contrasts whose cost is essentially zero. As pure social conventions, signals of this kind cannot evolve in a Darwinian social world—they are a theoretical impossibility.
Being intrinsically unreliable, language works only if one can build up a reputation for trustworthiness within a certain kind of society—namely, one where symbolic cultural facts (sometimes called "institutional facts") can be established and maintained through collective social endorsement. In any hunter-gatherer society, the basic mechanism for establishing trust in symbolic cultural facts is collective ''ritual''. Therefore, the task facing researchers into the origins of language is more multidisciplinary than is usually supposed. It involves addressing the evolutionary emergence of human symbolic culture as a whole, with language an important but subsidiary component.
Critics of the theory include
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is ...
, who terms it the "non-existence" hypothesis—a denial of the very existence of language as an object of study for natural science. Chomsky's own theory is that language emerged in an instant and in perfect form,
prompting his critics in turn, to retort that only something that does not exist—a theoretical construct or convenient scientific fiction—could possibly emerge in such a miraculous way.
The controversy remains unresolved.
Tool resiliency, grammar and language production
Acheulean
Acheulean (; also Acheulian and Mode II), from the French ''acheuléen'' after the type site of Saint-Acheul, is an archaeological industry of stone tool manufacture characterized by the distinctive oval and pear-shaped "hand axes" associated ...
tool use began during the
Lower Paleolithic
The Lower Paleolithic (or Lower Palaeolithic) is the earliest subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. It spans the time from around 3 million years ago when the first evidence for stone tool production and use by hominins appears in ...
approximately 1.75 million years ago. Studies focusing on the lateralization of Acheulean tool production and language production have noted similar areas of blood flow when engaging in these activities separately; this theory suggests that the brain functions needed for the production of tools across generations is consistent with the brain systems required for producing language. Researchers used functional transcranial Doppler ultrasonography (fTDC) and had participants perform activities related to the creation of tools using the same methods during the Lower Paleolithic as well as a task designed specifically for word generation.
The purpose of this test was to focus on the planning aspect of Acheulean tool making and cued word generation in language (an example of cued word generation would be someone giving you a random letter and then you list all words beginning with that letter that you can think of). Theories of language developing alongside tool use has been theorized by multiple individuals, however until recently there has been little empirical data to support these hypotheses. Focusing on the results of the study performed by Uomini et al. evidence for the usage of the same brain areas has been found when looking at cued word generation and Achuelean tool use. The relationship between tool use and language production is found in working and planning memory respectively and was found to be similar across a variety of participants furthering evidence that these areas of the brain are shared.
This evidence lends credibility to the theory that language developed alongside tool use in the Lower Paleolithic.
Humanistic theory
The
humanistic
Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential and agency of human beings. It considers human beings the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry.
The meaning of the term "humani ...
tradition considers language as a human invention.
Renaissance philosopher Antoine Arnauld
Antoine Arnauld (6 February 16128 August 1694) was a French Catholic theologian, philosopher and mathematician. He was one of the leading intellectuals of the Jansenist group of Port-Royal and had a very thorough knowledge of patristics. Contem ...
gave a detailed description of his idea of the origin of language in
Port-Royal Grammar
The ''Port-Royal Grammar'' (originally ''Grammaire générale et raisonnée contenant les fondemens de l'art de parler, expliqués d'une manière claire et naturelle'', "General and Rational Grammar, containing the fundamentals of the art of speaki ...
. According to Arnauld, people are social and rational by nature, and this urged them to create language as a means to communicate their ideas to others. Language construction would have occurred through a slow and gradual process. In later theory, especially in
functional linguistics
Functional linguistics is an approach to the study of language characterized by taking systematically into account the speaker's and the hearer's side, and the communicative needs of the speaker and of the given language community. Linguistic fun ...
, the primacy of
communication
Communication (from la, communicare, meaning "to share" or "to be in relation with") is usually defined as the transmission of information. The term may also refer to the message communicated through such transmissions or the field of inquir ...
is emphasised over psychological needs.
The exact way language evolved is however not considered as vital to the study of languages.
Structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure (; ; 26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widel ...
abandoned
evolutionary linguistics
Evolutionary linguistics or Darwinian linguistics is a sociobiological approach to the study of language. Evolutionary linguists consider linguistics as a subfield of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. The approach is also closely linked ...
after having come to the firm conclusion that it would not be able to provide any further revolutionary insight after the completion of the major works in
historical linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
# to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
# ...
by the end of the 19th century. Saussure was particularly sceptical of the attempts of
August Schleicher
August Schleicher (; 19 February 1821 – 6 December 1868) was a German linguist. His great work was ''A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages'' in which he attempted to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European languag ...
and other Darwinian linguists to access prehistorical languages through series of reconstructions of
proto-language
In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattest ...
s.
Evolutionary research had many other critics, too.
The Paris linguistic society famously banned the topic of language evolution in 1866 because it was considered as lacking scientific proof.
Around the same time,
Max Müller
Friedrich Max Müller (; 6 December 1823 – 28 October 1900) was a German-born philologist and Orientalist, who lived and studied in Britain for most of his life. He was one of the founders of the western academic disciplines of Indian ...
ridiculed popular accounts to explain language origin. In his classifications, the "
bow-wow theory" is the type of explanation that considers languages as having evolved as an imitation of natural sounds. The "pooh-pooh theory" holds that speech originated from spontaneous human cries and exclamations; the "yo-he-ho theory" suggests that language developed from grunts and gasps evoked by physical exertion; while the "sing-song theory" claims that speech arose from primitive ritual chants.
Saussure's solution to the problem of language evolution involves dividing
theoretical linguistics
Theoretical linguistics is a term in linguistics which, like the related term general linguistics, can be understood in different ways. Both can be taken as a reference to theory of language, or the branch of linguistics which inquires into the n ...
in two. Evolutionary and
historical linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
# to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
# ...
are renamed as
diachronic linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
# to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
# ...
. It is the study of
language change
Language change is variation over time in a language's features. It is studied in several subfields of linguistics: historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and evolutionary linguistics. Traditional theories of historical linguistics identify ...
, but it has only limited explanatory power due to the inadequacy of all of the reliable research material that could ever be made available.
Synchronic linguistics, in contrast, aims to widen scientists' understanding of language through a study of a given contemporary or historical language stage as a system in its own right.
Although Saussure paid much focus to diachronic linguistics, later structuralists who equated structuralism with the synchronic analysis were sometimes criticised of
ahistoricism
Ahistoricism refers to a lack of concern for history, historical development, or tradition.
Charges of ahistoricism are frequently critical, implying that the subject is historically inaccurate or ignorant (for example, an ''ahistorical'' attitud ...
. According to
structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss (, ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair of Social Anthro ...
, language and meaning—in opposition to "knowledge, which develops slowly and progressively"—must have appeared in an instant.
Structuralism, as first introduced to
sociology
Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of Interpersonal ties, social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of Empirical ...
by
Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim ( or ; 15 April 1858 – 15 November 1917) was a French sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, al ...
, is nonetheless a type of humanistic evolutionary theory which explains diversification as necessitated by growing complexity.
There was a shift of focus to functional explanation after Saussure's death. Functional structuralists including the
Prague Circle linguists and
André Martinet
André Martinet (; Saint-Alban-des-Villards, 12 April 1908 – Châtenay-Malabry, 16 July 1999) was a French linguist, influential due to his work on structural linguistics.
Life and work
Martinet passed his ''agrégation'' in English and recei ...
explained the growth and maintenance of structures as being necessitated by their functions.
For example, novel technologies make it necessary for people to invent new words, but these may lose their function and be forgotten as the technologies are eventually replaced by more modern ones.
Chomsky's single-step theory
According to
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is ...
's single-mutation theory, the emergence of language resembled the formation of a crystal; with
digital infinity as the
seed crystal in a super-saturated primate brain, on the verge of blossoming into the human mind, by physical law, once
evolution
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...
added a single small but crucial keystone.
Thus, in this theory, language appeared rather suddenly within the history of human evolution. Chomsky, writing with computational linguist and computer scientist Robert C. Berwick, suggests that this scenario is completely compatible with modern biology. They note that "none of the recent accounts of human language evolution seem to have completely grasped the shift from conventional Darwinism to its fully
stochastic
Stochastic (, ) refers to the property of being well described by a random probability distribution. Although stochasticity and randomness are distinct in that the former refers to a modeling approach and the latter refers to phenomena themselv ...
modern version—specifically, that there are stochastic effects not only due to sampling like directionless drift, but also due to directed stochastic variation in fitness, migration, and heritability—indeed, all the "forces" that affect individual or gene frequencies... All this can affect evolutionary outcomes—outcomes that as far as we can make out are not brought out in recent books on the evolution of language, yet would arise immediately in the case of any new genetic or individual innovation, precisely the kind of scenario likely to be in play when talking about language's emergence."
Citing evolutionary geneticist
Svante Pääbo
Svante Pääbo (; born 20 April 1955) is a Swedish geneticist who specialises in the field of evolutionary genetics. As one of the founders of paleogenetics, he has worked extensively on the Neanderthal genome. In 1997, he became founding dire ...
, they concur that a substantial difference must have occurred to differentiate ''
Homo sapiens
Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, ...
'' from
Neanderthal
Neanderthals (, also ''Homo neanderthalensis'' and erroneously ''Homo sapiens neanderthalensis''), also written as Neandertals, are an extinct species or subspecies of archaic humans who lived in Eurasia until about 40,000 years ago. While th ...
s to "prompt the relentless spread of our species, who had never crossed open water, up and out of Africa and then on across the entire planet in just a few tens of thousands of years.... What we do not see is any kind of 'gradualism' in new tool technologies or innovations like fire, shelters, or figurative art." Berwick and Chomsky therefore suggest language emerged approximately between 200,000 years ago and 60,000 years ago (between the appearance of the first anatomically modern humans in southern Africa and the last exodus from Africa respectively). "That leaves us with about 130,000 years, or approximately 5,000–6,000 generations of time for evolutionary change. This is not 'overnight in one generation' as some have (incorrectly) inferred—but neither is it on the scale of geological eons. It's time enough—within the ballpark for what Nilsson and Pelger (1994) estimated as the time required for the full evolution of a
vertebrate
Vertebrates () comprise all animal taxa within the subphylum Vertebrata () ( chordates with backbones), including all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. Vertebrates represent the overwhelming majority of the phylum Chordata, ...
eye from a single cell, even without the invocation of any 'evo-devo' effects."
The single-mutation theory of language evolution has been directly questioned on different grounds. A formal analysis of the probability of such a mutation taking place and going to fixation in the species has concluded that such a scenario is unlikely, with multiple mutations with more moderate fitness effects being more probable. Another criticism has questioned the logic of the argument for single mutation and puts forward that from the formal simplicity of
Merge
Merge, merging, or merger may refer to:
Concepts
* Merge (traffic), the reduction of the number of lanes on a road
* Merge (linguistics), a basic syntactic operation in generative syntax in the Minimalist Program
* Merger (politics), the comb ...
, the capacity Berwick and Chomsky deem the core property of human language that emerged suddenly, one cannot derive the (number of) evolutionary steps that led to it.
The Romulus and Remus hypothesis
The Romulus and Remus hypothesis, proposed by neuroscientist Andrey Vyshedskiy, seeks to address the question as to why the modern speech apparatus originated over 500,000 years before the earliest signs of modern human imagination. This hypothesis proposes that there were two phases that led to modern recursive language. The phenomenon of
recursion
Recursion (adjective: ''recursive'') occurs when a thing is defined in terms of itself or of its type. Recursion is used in a variety of disciplines ranging from linguistics to logic. The most common application of recursion is in mathematics ...
occurs across multiple linguistic domains, arguably most prominently in
syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...
and
morphology
Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to:
Disciplines
* Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts
* Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...
. Thus, by nesting a structure such as a sentence or a word within themselves, it enables the generation of potentially (
countably
In mathematics, a set is countable if either it is finite or it can be made in one to one correspondence with the set of natural numbers. Equivalently, a set is ''countable'' if there exists an injective function from it into the natural numbers; ...
) infinite new variations of that structure. For example, the base sentence
eter likes apples.can be nested in
irrealis
In linguistics, irrealis moods (abbreviated ) are the main set of grammatical moods that indicate that a certain situation or action is not known to have happened at the moment the speaker is talking. This contrasts with the realis moods.
Every ...
clauses to produce
Mary_said_[Peter_likes_apples.,_[Paul_believed_[Mary_said_[Peter_likes_apples..html" ;"title="eter_likes_apples..html" ;"title="Mary said [Peter likes apples.">Mary said [Peter likes apples., [Paul believed [Mary said [Peter likes apples.">eter_likes_apples..html" ;"title="Mary said [Peter likes apples.">Mary said [Peter likes apples., [Paul believed [Mary said [Peter likes apples.] and so forth.
The first phase includes the slow development of non-recursive language with a large vocabulary along with the modern speech apparatus, which includes changes to the hyoid bone, increased voluntary control of the muscles of the diaphragm, the evolution of the FOXP2 gene, as well as other changes by 600,000 years ago. Then, the second phase was a rapid
Chomskian single step, consisting of three distinct events that happened in quick succession around 70,000 years ago and allowed the shift from non-recursive to recursive language in early hominins.
# A genetic mutation that slowed down the
prefrontal synthesis
Prefrontal synthesis (PFS, also known as mental synthesis) is the conscious purposeful process of synthesizing novel mental images. PFS is neurologically different from the other types of imagination, such as simple memory recall and dreaming. Un ...
(PFS) critical period of at least two children that lived together.
# This allowed these children to create recursive elements of language such as spatial prepositions.
# Then this merged with their parents' non-recursive language to create recursive language.
It is not enough for children to have a modern prefrontal cortex (PFC) to allow the development of PFS; the children must also be mentally stimulated and have recursive elements already in their language to acquire PFS. Since their parents would not have invented these elements yet, the children would have had to do it themselves, which is a common occurrence among young children that live together, in a process called
cryptophasia
Cryptophasia is a phenomenon of a language developed by twins (identical or fraternal) that only the two children can understand. The word has its roots from the Greek ''crypto-'', meaning secret, and ''-phasia'', meaning speech. Most linguists ass ...
. This means that delayed PFC development would have allowed more time to acquire PFS and develop recursive elements.
Delayed PFC development also comes with negative consequences, such as a longer period of reliance on one's parents to survive and lower survival rates. For modern language to have occurred, PFC delay had to have an immense survival benefit in later life, such as PFS ability. This suggests that the mutation that caused PFC delay and the development of recursive language and PFS occurred simultaneously, which lines up with evidence of a genetic bottleneck around 70,000 years ago. This could have been the result of a few individuals who developed PFS and recursive language which gave them significant competitive advantage over all other humans at the time.
Gestural theory
The gestural theory states that human language developed from
gesture
A gesture is a form of non-verbal communication or non-vocal communication in which visible bodily actions communicate particular messages, either in place of, or in conjunction with, speech. Gestures include movement of the hands, face, or ot ...
s that were used for simple communication.
Two types of evidence support this theory.
# Gestural language and vocal language depend on similar neural systems. The regions on the
cortex
Cortex or cortical may refer to:
Biology
* Cortex (anatomy), the outermost layer of an organ
** Cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the vertebrate cerebrum, part of which is the ''forebrain''
*** Motor cortex, the regions of the cerebral cortex i ...
that are responsible for mouth and hand movements border each other.
# Nonhuman
primates
Primates are a diverse order of mammals. They are divided into the strepsirrhines, which include the lemurs, galagos, and lorisids, and the haplorhines, which include the tarsiers and the simians (monkeys and apes, the latter including huma ...
can use gestures or symbols for at least primitive communication, and some of their gestures resemble those of humans, such as the "begging posture", with the hands stretched out, which humans share with chimpanzees.
Research has found strong support for the idea that
verbal language and sign language depend on similar neural structures. Patients who used sign language, and who suffered from a left-
hemisphere
Hemisphere refers to:
* A half of a sphere
As half of the Earth
* A hemisphere of Earth
** Northern Hemisphere
** Southern Hemisphere
** Eastern Hemisphere
** Western Hemisphere
** Land and water hemispheres
* A half of the (geocentric) celes ...
lesion
A lesion is any damage or abnormal change in the tissue of an organism, usually caused by disease or trauma. ''Lesion'' is derived from the Latin "injury". Lesions may occur in plants as well as animals.
Types
There is no designated classifi ...
, showed the same disorders with their sign language as vocal patients did with their oral language.
Other researchers found that the same left-hemisphere brain regions were active during sign language as during the use of vocal or written language.
Primate gesture is at least partially genetic: different nonhuman apes will perform gestures characteristic of their species, even if they have never seen another ape perform that gesture. For example, gorillas beat their breasts. This shows that gestures are an intrinsic and important part of primate communication, which supports the idea that language evolved from gesture.
Further evidence suggests that gesture and language are linked. In humans, manually gesturing has an effect on concurrent vocalizations, thus creating certain natural vocal associations of manual efforts. Chimpanzees move their mouths when performing fine motor tasks. These mechanisms may have played an evolutionary role in enabling the development of intentional vocal communication as a supplement to gestural communication. Voice modulation could have been prompted by preexisting manual actions.
From infancy, gestures both supplement and predict speech. This addresses the idea that gestures quickly change in humans from a sole means of communication (from a very young age) to a supplemental and predictive behavior that is used despite the ability to communicate verbally. This too serves as a parallel to the idea that gestures developed first and language subsequently built upon it.
Two possible scenarios have been proposed for the development of language,
[Rizzolatti, G. (2008). Giacomo Rizzolatti on the Evolution of Language. Retrieved from http://gocognitive.net/interviews/evolution-language-gestures] one of which supports the gestural theory:
# Language developed from the calls of human ancestors.
# Language was derived from gesture.
The first perspective that language evolved from the calls of human ancestors seems logical because both humans and animals make sounds or cries. One evolutionary reason to refute this is that, anatomically, the centre that controls calls in monkeys and other animals is located in a completely different part of the brain than in humans. In monkeys, this centre is located in the depths of the brain related to emotions. In the human system, it is located in an area unrelated to emotion. Humans can communicate simply to communicate—without emotions. So, anatomically, this scenario does not work.
This suggests that language was derived from gesture
(humans communicated by gesture first and sound was attached later).
The important question for gestural theories is why there was a shift to vocalization. Various explanations have been proposed:
# Human ancestors started to use more and more tools, meaning that their hands were occupied and could no longer be used for gesturing.
# Manual gesturing requires that speakers and listeners be visible to one another. In many situations, they might need to communicate, even without visual contact—for example after nightfall or when foliage obstructs visibility.
# A composite hypothesis holds that early language took the form of part gestural and part vocal
mimesis
Mimesis (; grc, μίμησις, ''mīmēsis'') is a term used in literary criticism and philosophy that carries a wide range of meanings, including ''imitatio'', imitation, nonsensuous similarity, receptivity, representation, mimicry, the act ...
(imitative 'song-and-dance'), combining modalities because all signals (like those of nonhuman apes and monkeys) still needed to be costly in order to be intrinsically convincing. In that event, each multi-media display would have needed not just to disambiguate an intended meaning but also to inspire confidence in the signal's reliability. The suggestion is that only once community-wide contractual understandings had come into force
could trust in communicative intentions be automatically assumed, at last allowing ''Homo sapiens'' to shift to a more efficient default format. Since vocal distinctive features (sound contrasts) are ideal for this purpose, it was only at this point—when intrinsically persuasive body-language was no longer required to convey each message—that the decisive shift from manual gesture to the current primary reliance on ''spoken'' language occurred.
A comparable hypothesis states that in 'articulate' language, gesture and vocalisation are intrinsically linked, as language evolved from equally intrinsically linked dance and song.
Humans still use manual and facial gestures when they speak, especially when people meet who have no language in common. There are also a great number of
sign language
Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign l ...
s still in existence, commonly associated with deaf communities. These sign languages are equal in complexity, sophistication, and expressive power, to any oral language. The cognitive functions are similar and the parts of the brain used are similar. The main difference is that the "phonemes" are produced on the outside of the body, articulated with hands, body, and facial expression, rather than inside the body articulated with tongue, teeth, lips, and breathing. (Compare the
motor theory of speech perception
The motor theory of speech perception is the hypothesis that people perceive spoken words by identifying the vocal tract gestures with which they are pronounced rather than by identifying the sound patterns that speech generates. It originally cl ...
.)
It is suggested that nature has allotted psychological representations to all gestures, including vocal gestures. Animals have no intellectual purpose. Hence animals of the same species from different continents can communicate psychologically without learning any sign language. In the case of humans, in addition to the gestures, the vocal gestures are arbitrarily converted into the intellectual sense. This arbitrariness depends on biological, psychological, and intellectual needs and capabilities, which differ from place to place, creating language differences.
Critics of gestural theory note that it is difficult to name serious reasons why the initial pitch-based vocal communication (which is present in primates) would be abandoned in favor of the much less effective non-vocal, gestural communication. However,
Michael Corballis
Michael Charles Corballis (10 September 1936 – 13 November 2021) was a New Zealand and Canadian psychologist and author. He was Emeritus Professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Auckland. His fields of research were cogn ...
has pointed out that it is supposed that primate vocal communication (such as alarm calls) cannot be controlled consciously, unlike hand movement, and thus it is not credible as precursor to human language; primate vocalization is rather homologous to and continued in involuntary reflexes (connected with basic human emotions) such as screams or laughter (the fact that these can be faked does not disprove the fact that genuine involuntary responses to fear or surprise exist).
Also, gesture is not generally less effective, and depending on the situation can even be advantageous, for example in a loud environment or where it is important to be silent, such as on a hunt. Other challenges to the "gesture-first" theory have been presented by researchers in
psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind ...
, including
David McNeill
Glenn David McNeill (born 1933 in California, United States) is an Americans, American psychologist and Author, writer specializing in Research#Scientific research, scientific research into psycholinguistics and especially the relationship of ...
.
Tool-use associated sound in the evolution of language
Proponents of the motor theory of language evolution have primarily focused on the visual domain and communication through observation of movements. The ''Tool-use sound hypothesis'' suggests that the production and perception of sound also contributed substantially, particularly ''incidental sound of locomotion'' (''ISOL'') and ''tool-use sound'' (''TUS'').
Human bipedalism resulted in rhythmic and more predictable ''ISOL''. That may have stimulated the evolution of musical abilities, auditory working memory, and abilities to produce complex vocalizations, and to mimic natural sounds. Since the human brain proficiently extracts information about objects and events from the sounds they produce, ''TUS'', and mimicry of ''TUS'', might have achieved an iconic function. The prevalence of sound symbolism in many extant languages supports this idea. Self-produced TUS activates multimodal brain processing (
motor neuron
A motor neuron (or motoneuron or efferent neuron) is a neuron whose cell body is located in the motor cortex, brainstem or the spinal cord, and whose axon (fiber) projects to the spinal cord or outside of the spinal cord to directly or indirectl ...
s, hearing,
proprioception
Proprioception ( ), also referred to as kinaesthesia (or kinesthesia), is the sense of self-movement, force, and body position. It is sometimes described as the "sixth sense".
Proprioception is mediated by proprioceptors, mechanosensory neurons ...
, touch, vision), and ''TUS'' stimulates primate audiovisual mirror neurons, which is likely to stimulate the development of association chains. Tool use and auditory gestures involve motor-processing of the forelimbs, which is associated with the evolution of vertebrate vocal communication. The production, perception, and mimicry of ''TUS'' may have resulted in a limited number of vocalizations or protowords that were associated with tool use.
A new way to communicate about tools, especially when out of sight, would have had selective advantage. A gradual change in acoustic properties, meaning, or both could have resulted in arbitrariness and an expanded repertoire of words. Humans have been increasingly exposed to ''TUS'' over millions of years, coinciding with the period during which spoken language evolved.
Mirror neurons and language origins
In humans,
functional MRI
Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI (fMRI) measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. This technique relies on the fact that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activation are coupled. When an area o ...
studies have reported finding areas homologous to the monkey
mirror neuron
A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Such neurons hav ...
system in the
inferior frontal cortex, close to
Broca's area
Broca's area, or the Broca area (, also , ), is a region in the frontal lobe of the dominant Cerebral hemisphere, hemisphere, usually the left, of the Human brain, brain with functions linked to speech production.
Language processing in the brai ...
, one of the language regions of the brain. This has led to suggestions that human language evolved from a gesture performance/understanding system implemented in mirror neurons. Mirror neurons have been said to have the potential to provide a mechanism for action-understanding, imitation-learning, and the simulation of other people's behavior. This hypothesis is supported by some
cytoarchitectonic homologies between monkey premotor area F5 and human Broca's area.
Rates of vocabulary expansion link to the ability of children to vocally mirror non-words and so to acquire the new word pronunciations. Such
speech repetition
250px, Children copy with their own mouths the words spoken by the mouths of those around them. That enables them to learn the pronunciation of words not already in their vocabulary.
Speech repetition occurs when individuals speech, speak the so ...
occurs automatically, quickly
and separately in the brain to
speech perception
Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by wh ...
.
Moreover, such vocal imitation can occur without comprehension such as in
speech shadowing
Speech shadowing is a psycholinguistic experimental technique in which subjects repeat speech at a delay to the onset of hearing the phrase. The time between hearing the speech and responding, is how long the brain takes to process and produce spee ...
and
echolalia
Echolalia is the unsolicited repetition of vocalizations made by another person (when repeated by the same person, it is called palilalia). In its profound form it is automatic and effortless. It is one of the echophenomena, closely related t ...
.
Further evidence for this link comes from a recent study in which the brain activity of two participants was measured using fMRI while they were gesturing words to each other using hand gestures with a game of
charades
Charades (, ). is a parlor game, parlor or party game, party word game, word guessing game. Originally, the game was a dramatic form of literary charades: a single person would act out each syllable of a word or phrase in order, followed by the w ...
—a modality that some have suggested might represent the evolutionary precursor of human language. Analysis of the data using
Granger Causality
The Granger causality test is a statistical hypothesis test for determining whether one time series is useful in forecasting another, first proposed in 1969. Ordinarily, regressions reflect "mere" correlations, but Clive Granger argued that cau ...
revealed that the mirror-neuron system of the observer indeed reflects the pattern of activity of in the motor system of the sender, supporting the idea that the motor concept associated with the words is indeed transmitted from one brain to another using the mirror system.
Not all linguists agree with the above arguments, however. In particular, supporters of Noam Chomsky argue against the possibility that the mirror neuron system can play any role in the hierarchical recursive structures essential to syntax.
Putting-down-the-baby theory
According to
Dean Falk
Dean Falk (born June 25, 1944) is an American academic neuroanthropologist who specializes in the evolution of the brain and cognition in higher primates. She is the Hale G. Smith Professor of Anthropology and a Distinguished Research Professor ...
's "putting-down-the-baby" theory, vocal interactions between early hominid mothers and infants began a sequence of events that led, eventually, to human ancestors' earliest words.
The basic idea is that evolving human mothers, unlike their counterparts in other primates, could not move around and forage with their infants clinging onto their backs. Loss of fur in the human case left infants with no means of clinging on. Frequently, therefore, mothers had to put their babies down. As a result, these babies needed to be reassured that they were not being abandoned. Mothers responded by developing 'motherese'—an infant-directed communicative system embracing facial expressions, body language, touching, patting, caressing, laughter, tickling and emotionally expressive contact calls. The argument is that language developed out of this interaction.
In ''
The Mental and Social Life of Babies
''The Mental and Social Life of Babies'' is a 1982 book by Kenneth Kaye. Integrating a contemporary burgeoning field of research on infant cognitive and social development in the first two years of life with his own laboratory's studies at the Uni ...
'', psychologist
Kenneth Kaye
Kenneth Kaye (January 24, 1946 – May 26, 2021) was an American psychologist and writer whose research, books, and articles connect the fields of human development, family relationships and conflict resolution.
Life
Although spanning several p ...
noted that no usable adult language could have evolved without interactive communication between very young children and adults. "No symbolic system could have survived from one generation to the next if it could not have been easily acquired by young children under their normal conditions of social life."
From-where-to-what theory
![From where to what](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/From_where_to_what.png)
The "from where to what" model is a language evolution model that is derived primarily from the organization of
language processing in the brain
Language processing refers to the way humans use words to communicate ideas and feelings, and how such communications are processed and understood. Language processing is considered to be a uniquely human ability that is not produced with the sa ...
into two structures: the auditory dorsal stream and the auditory ventral stream. It hypothesizes seven stages of language evolution (see illustration). Speech originated for the purpose of exchanging contact calls between mothers and their offspring to find one another in the event they became separated (illustration part 1). The contact calls could be modified with intonations in order to express either a higher or lower level of distress (illustration part 2). The use of two types of contact calls enabled the first question-answer conversation. In this scenario, the child would emit a low-level distress call to express a desire to interact with an object, and the mother would respond with either another low-level distress call (to express approval of the interaction) or a high-level distress call (to express disapproval) (illustration part 3). Over time, the improved use of intonations and vocal control led to the invention of unique calls (phonemes) associated with distinct objects (illustration part 4). At first, children learned the calls (phonemes) from their parents by imitating their lip-movements (illustration part 5). Eventually, infants were able to encode into long-term memory all the calls (phonemes). Consequentially, mimicry via lip-reading was limited to infancy and older children learned new calls through mimicry without lip-reading (illustration part 6). Once individuals became capable of producing a sequence of calls, this allowed multi-syllabic words, which increased the size of their vocabulary (illustration part 7). The use of words, composed of sequences of syllables, provided the infra structure for communicating with sequences of words (i.e., sentences).
The theory's name is derived from the two auditory streams, which are both found in the brains of humans and other primates. The auditory ventral stream is responsible for sound recognition, and so it is referred to as the auditory ''what'' stream. In primates, the auditory dorsal stream is responsible for sound localization, and thus it is called the auditory ''where'' stream. Only in humans (in the left hemisphere), is it also responsible for other processes associated with language use and acquisition, such as speech repetition and production, integration of phonemes with their lip movements, perception and production of intonations, phonological long-term memory (long-term memory storage of the sounds of words), and phonological working memory (the temporary storage of the sounds of words).
Some evidence also indicates a role in recognising others by their voices. The emergence of each of these functions in the auditory dorsal stream represents an intermediate stage in the evolution of language.
A contact call origin for human language is consistent with animal studies, as like human language, contact call discrimination in monkeys is lateralised to the left hemisphere. Mice with knock-out to language related genes (such as FOXP2 and
SRPX2) also resulted in the pups no longer emitting contact calls when separated from their mothers. Supporting this model is also its ability to explain unique human phenomena, such as the use of intonations when converting words into commands and questions, the tendency of infants to mimic vocalisations during the first year of life (and its disappearance later on) and the protruding and visible human lips, which are not found in other apes. This theory could be considered an elaboration of the putting-down-the-baby theory of language evolution.
Grammaticalisation theory
"
Grammaticalisation
In historical linguistics, grammaticalization (also known as grammatization or grammaticization) is a process of language change by which words representing objects and actions (i.e. nouns and verbs) become grammatical markers (such as affixes or p ...
" is a continuous historical process in which free-standing words develop into grammatical appendages, while these in turn become ever more specialised and grammatical. An initially "incorrect" usage, in becoming accepted, leads to unforeseen consequences, triggering knock-on effects and extended sequences of change. Paradoxically, grammar evolves because, in the final analysis, humans care less about grammatical niceties than about making themselves understood. If this is how grammar evolves today, according to this school of thought, similar principles at work can be legitimately inferred among distant human ancestors, when grammar itself was first being established.
In order to reconstruct the evolutionary transition from early language to languages with complex grammars, it is necessary to know which hypothetical sequences are plausible and which are not. In order to convey abstract ideas, the first recourse of speakers is to fall back on immediately recognizable concrete imagery, very often deploying
metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide (or obscure) clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are often compared wit ...
s rooted in shared bodily experience.
[Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson 1980. ''Metaphors We Live By''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.] A familiar example is the use of concrete terms such as "belly" or "back" to convey abstract meanings such as "inside" or "behind". Equally metaphorical is the strategy of representing temporal patterns on the model of spatial ones. For example, English speakers might say "It is going to rain", modelled on "I am going to London." This can be abbreviated colloquially to "It's gonna rain." Even when in a hurry, English speakers do not say "I'm gonna London"—the contraction is restricted to the job of specifying tense. From such examples it can be seen why grammaticalisation is consistently unidirectional—from concrete to abstract meaning, not the other way around.
Grammaticalisation theorists picture early language as simple, perhaps consisting only of nouns.
p. 111 Even under that extreme theoretical assumption, however, it is difficult to imagine what would realistically have prevented people from using, say, "spear" as if it were a verb ("Spear that pig!"). People might have used their nouns as verbs or their verbs as nouns as occasion demanded. In short, while a noun-only language might seem theoretically possible, grammaticalisation theory indicates that it cannot have remained fixed in that state for any length of time.
Creativity drives grammatical change.
This presupposes a certain attitude on the part of listeners. Instead of punishing deviations from accepted usage, listeners must prioritise imaginative mind-reading. Imaginative creativity—emitting a leopard alarm when no leopard was present, for example—is not the kind of behaviour which, say,
vervet monkey
The vervet monkey (''Chlorocebus pygerythrus''), or simply vervet, is an Old World monkey of the family Cercopithecidae native to Africa. The term "vervet" is also used to refer to all the members of the genus ''Chlorocebus''. The five distinct ...
s would appreciate or reward.
Creativity and reliability are incompatible demands; for "Machiavellian" primates as for animals generally, the overriding pressure is to demonstrate reliability.
If humans escape these constraints, it is because in their case, listeners are primarily interested in mental states.
To focus on mental states is to accept fictions—inhabitants of the imagination—as potentially informative and interesting. An example is metaphor: a metaphor is, literally, a false statement. In
Romeo and Juliet
''Romeo and Juliet'' is a Shakespearean tragedy, tragedy written by William Shakespeare early in his career about the romance between two Italian youths from feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetim ...
, Romeo declares "Juliet is the sun!". Juliet is a woman, not a ball of plasma in the sky, but human listeners are not (or not usually) pedants insistent on point-by-point factual accuracy. They want to know what the speaker has in mind. Grammaticalisation is essentially based on metaphor. To outlaw its use would be to stop grammar from evolving and, by the same token, to exclude all possibility of expressing abstract thought.
A criticism of all this is that while grammaticalisation theory might explain language change today, it does not satisfactorily address the really difficult challenge—explaining the initial transition from primate-style communication to language as it is known today. Rather, the theory assumes that language already exists. As Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva acknowledge: "Grammaticalisation requires a linguistic system that is used regularly and frequently within a community of speakers and is passed on from one group of speakers to another".
Outside modern humans, such conditions do not prevail.
Evolution-progression model
Human language is used for self-expression; however, expression displays different stages. The consciousness of self and feelings represents the stage immediately prior to the external, phonetic expression of feelings in the form of sound, i.e., language. Intelligent animals such as dolphins, Eurasian magpies, and chimpanzees live in communities, wherein they assign themselves roles for group survival and show emotions such as sympathy.
When such animals view their reflection (
mirror test
The mirror test—sometimes called the mark test, mirror self-recognition (MSR) test, red spot technique, or rouge test—is a behavioral technique developed in 1970 by American psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr. as an attempt to determine whether an ...
), they recognise themselves and exhibit
self-consciousness
Self-consciousness is a heightened sense of awareness of oneself. It is not to be confused with consciousness in the sense of qualia. Historically, "self-consciousness" was synonymous with " self-awareness", referring to a state of awareness that ...
.
Notably, humans evolved in a quite different environment than that of these animals. Human survival became easier with the development of tools, shelter, and fire, thus facilitating further advancement of social interaction, self-expression, and tool-making, as for hunting and gathering. The increasing brain size allowed advanced provisioning and tools and the technological advances during the Palaeolithic era that built upon the previous evolutionary innovations of bipedalism and hand versatility allowed the development of human language.
Self-domesticated ape theory
According to a study investigating the song differences between
white-rumped munia
The white-rumped munia (''Lonchura striata'') or white-rumped mannikin, sometimes called striated finch in aviculture, is a small passerine bird from the family (biology), family of waxbill "finches" (Estrildidae). These are not close relatives o ...
s and its domesticated counterpart (
Bengalese finch), the wild munias use a highly stereotyped song sequence, whereas the domesticated ones sing a highly unconstrained song. In wild finches, song syntax is subject to female preference—
sexual selection
Sexual selection is a mode of natural selection in which members of one biological sex mate choice, choose mates of the other sex to mating, mate with (intersexual selection), and compete with members of the same sex for access to members of t ...
—and remains relatively fixed. However, in the Bengalese finch, natural selection is replaced by breeding, in this case for colourful plumage, and thus, decoupled from selective pressures, stereotyped song syntax is allowed to drift. It is replaced, supposedly within 1000 generations, by a variable and learned sequence. Wild finches, moreover, are thought incapable of learning song sequences from other finches.
In the field of
bird vocalisation
Bird vocalization includes both bird calls and bird songs. In non-technical use, bird songs are the bird sounds that are melodious to the human ear. In ornithology and birding, songs (relatively complex vocalizations) are distinguished by func ...
, brains capable of producing only an innate song have very simple neural pathways: the primary forebrain motor centre, called the robust nucleus of
arcopallium
The arcopallium refers to regions of the avian brain which partially overlap regions homologous to the amygdala of mammals. These regions have formerly been referred to as archistriatum, and before this epistriatum or amygdaloid complex, and a r ...
, connects to midbrain vocal outputs, which in turn project to brainstem motor nuclei. By contrast, in brains capable of learning songs, the arcopallium receives input from numerous additional forebrain regions, including those involved in learning and social experience. Control over song generation has become less constrained, more distributed, and more flexible.
One way to think about human evolution is that humans are
self-domesticated apes. Just as domestication relaxed selection for stereotypic songs in the finches—mate choice was supplanted by choices made by the aesthetic sensibilities of bird breeders and their customers—so might human cultural domestication have relaxed selection on many of their primate behavioural traits, allowing old pathways to degenerate and reconfigure. Given the highly indeterminate way that mammalian brains develop—they basically construct themselves "bottom up", with one set of neuronal interactions preparing for the next round of interactions—degraded pathways would tend to seek out and find new opportunities for synaptic hookups. Such inherited de-differentiations of brain pathways might have contributed to the functional complexity that characterises human language. And, as exemplified by the finches, such de-differentiations can occur in very rapid time-frames.
Speech and language for communication
A distinction can be drawn between
speech
Speech is a human vocal communication using language. Each language uses Phonetics, phonetic combinations of vowel and consonant sounds that form the sound of its words (that is, all English words sound different from all French words, even if ...
and
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
. Language is not necessarily spoken: it might alternatively be written or signed. Speech is among a number of different methods of encoding and transmitting linguistic information, albeit arguably the most natural one.
Some scholars, such as Noam Chomsky, view language as an initially cognitive development, its "externalisation" to serve communicative purposes occurring later in human evolution. According to one such school of thought, the key feature distinguishing human language is
recursion
Recursion (adjective: ''recursive'') occurs when a thing is defined in terms of itself or of its type. Recursion is used in a variety of disciplines ranging from linguistics to logic. The most common application of recursion is in mathematics ...
,
(in this context, the iterative embedding of phrases within phrases). Other scholars—notably
Daniel Everett
Daniel Leonard Everett (born 26 July 1951) is an American linguist and author best known for his study of the Amazon basin's Pirahã people and their language.
Everett is currently Trustee Professor of Cognitive Sciences at Bentley University ...
—deny that recursion is universal, citing certain languages (e.g.
Pirahã) which allegedly lack this feature.
The ability to ask questions is considered by some to distinguish language from non-human systems of communication. Some captive primates (notably
bonobos
The bonobo (; ''Pan paniscus''), also historically called the pygmy chimpanzee and less often the dwarf chimpanzee or gracile chimpanzee, is an endangered great ape and one of the two species making up the genus '' Pan,'' the other being the comm ...
and
chimpanzees
The chimpanzee (''Pan troglodytes''), also known as simply the chimp, is a species of great ape native to the forest and savannah of tropical Africa. It has four confirmed subspecies and a fifth proposed subspecies. When its close relative the ...
), having learned to use rudimentary signing to communicate with their human trainers, proved able to respond correctly to complex questions and requests. Yet they failed to ask even the simplest questions themselves. Conversely, human children are able to ask their first questions (using only question
intonation) at the babbling period of their development, long before they start using syntactic structures. Although babies from different cultures acquire native languages from their social environment, all languages of the world without exception—tonal, non-tonal, intonational and accented—use similar rising "question intonation" for
yes–no question
In linguistics, a yes–no question, also known as a binary question, a polar question, or a general question is a question whose expected answer is one of two choices, one that provides an affirmative answer to the question versus one that provid ...
s.
This fact is a strong evidence of the universality of
question intonation. In general, according to some authors, sentence intonation/pitch is pivotal in spoken grammar and is the basic information used by children to learn the grammar of whatever language.
Cognitive development and language
Language users have high-level
reference
Reference is a relationship between objects in which one object designates, or acts as a means by which to connect to or link to, another object. The first object in this relation is said to ''refer to'' the second object. It is called a ''name'' ...
(or
deixis
In linguistics, deixis (, ) is the use of general words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context, e.g., the words ''tomorrow'', ''there'', and ''they''. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their de ...
), the ability to refer to things or states of being that are not in the immediate realm of the speaker. This ability is often related to theory of mind, or an awareness of the other as a being like the self with individual wants and intentions. According to Chomsky, Hauser and Fitch (2002), there are six main aspects of this high-level reference system:
*
Theory of mind
In psychology, theory of mind refers to the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them (that is, surmising what is happening in their mind). This includes the knowledge that others' mental states may be different fro ...
* Capacity to acquire non-linguistic conceptual representations, such as the object/kind distinction
* Referential vocal signals
* Imitation as a rational, intentional system
* Voluntary control over signal production as evidence of intentional communication
*
Number representation
Theory of mind
Simon Baron-Cohen
Sir Simon Philip Baron-Cohen (born 15 August 1958) is a British clinical psychologist and professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge. He is the director of the university's Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of ...
(1999) argues that theory of mind must have preceded language use, based on evidence of use of the following characteristics as much as 40,000 years ago: intentional communication, repairing failed communication, teaching, intentional persuasion, intentional deception, building shared plans and goals, intentional sharing of focus or topic, and pretending. Moreover, Baron-Cohen argues that many primates show some, but not all, of these abilities. Call and Tomasello's research on
chimpanzees
The chimpanzee (''Pan troglodytes''), also known as simply the chimp, is a species of great ape native to the forest and savannah of tropical Africa. It has four confirmed subspecies and a fifth proposed subspecies. When its close relative the ...
supports this, in that individual chimps seem to understand that other chimps have awareness, knowledge, and intention, but do not seem to understand false beliefs. Many primates show some tendencies toward a theory of mind, but not a full one as humans have.
Ultimately, there is some consensus within the field that a theory of mind is necessary for language use. Thus, the development of a full theory of mind in humans was a necessary precursor to full language use.
Number representation
In one particular study, rats and pigeons were required to press a button a certain number of times to get food. The animals showed very accurate distinction for numbers less than four, but as the numbers increased, the error rate increased.
In another, the
primatologist Tetsuro Matsuzawa
is a primatologist who was a past director of the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University. He graduated from Kyoto University with a B.A. degree in 1974, a Psy.M. degree in 1976 and a Ph.D. degree in Science in 1989.
Matsuzawa is know ...
attempted to teach chimpanzees Arabic numerals. The difference between primates and humans in this regard was very large, as it took the chimps thousands of trials to learn 1–9, with each number requiring a similar amount of training time; yet, after learning the meaning of 1, 2 and 3 (and sometimes 4), children (after the age of 5.5 to 6) easily comprehend the value of greater integers by using a
successor function
In mathematics, the successor function or successor operation sends a natural number to the next one. The successor function is denoted by ''S'', so ''S''(''n'') = ''n'' +1. For example, ''S''(1) = 2 and ''S''(2) = 3. The successor functio ...
(i.e. 2 is 1 greater than 1, 3 is 1 greater than 2, 4 is 1 greater than 3; once 4 is reached it seems most children
suddenly understand that the value of any integer ''n'' is 1 greater than the previous integer). Put simply, other primates learn the meaning of numbers one by one, similar to their approach to other referential symbols, while children first learn an arbitrary list of symbols (1, 2, 3, 4...) and then later learn their precise meanings.
These results can be seen as evidence for the application of the "open-ended generative property" of language in human numeral cognition.
Linguistic structures
Lexical-phonological principle
Hockett (1966) details a list of features regarded as essential to describing human language. In the domain of the lexical-phonological principle, two features of this list are most important:
* Productivity: users can create and understand completely novel messages.
** New messages are freely coined by blending, analogizing from, or transforming old ones.
** Either new or old elements are freely assigned new semantic loads by circumstances and context. This says that in every language, new idioms constantly come into existence.
*Duality (of Patterning): a large number of meaningful elements are made up of a conveniently small number of independently meaningless yet message-differentiating elements.
The sound system of a language is composed of a finite set of simple phonological items. Under the specific
phonotactic
Phonotactics (from Ancient Greek "voice, sound" and "having to do with arranging") is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable struc ...
rules of a given language, these items can be recombined and concatenated, giving rise to
morphology
Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to:
Disciplines
* Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts
* Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...
and the open-ended lexicon. A key feature of language is that a simple, finite set of phonological items gives rise to an infinite lexical system wherein rules determine the form of each item, and meaning is inextricably linked with form. Phonological syntax, then, is a simple combination of pre-existing phonological units. Related to this is another essential feature of human language: lexical syntax, wherein pre-existing units are combined, giving rise to semantically novel or distinct lexical items.
Certain elements of the lexical-phonological principle are known to exist outside of humans. While all (or nearly all) have been documented in some form in the natural world, very few coexist within the same species. Bird-song, singing nonhuman apes, and the songs of whales all display phonological syntax, combining units of sound into larger structures apparently devoid of enhanced or novel meaning. Certain other primate species do have simple phonological systems with units referring to entities in the world. However, in contrast to human systems, the units in these primates' systems normally occur in isolation, betraying a lack of lexical syntax. There is new evidence to suggest that Campbell's monkeys also display lexical syntax, combining two calls (a predator alarm call with a "boom", the combination of which denotes a lessened threat of danger), however it is still unclear whether this is a lexical or a morphological phenomenon.
Pidgins and creoles
Pidgins are significantly simplified languages with only rudimentary grammar and a restricted vocabulary. In their early stage, pidgins mainly consist of nouns, verbs, and adjectives with few or no articles, prepositions, conjunctions or auxiliary verbs. Often the grammar has no fixed
word order
In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...
and the words have no
inflection
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and defin ...
.
If contact is maintained between the groups speaking the pidgin for long periods of time, the pidgins may become more complex over many generations. If the children of one generation adopt the pidgin as their native language it develops into a
creole language
A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language. ...
, which becomes fixed and acquires a more complex grammar, with fixed phonology, syntax, morphology, and syntactic embedding. The syntax and morphology of such languages may often have local innovations not obviously derived from any of the parent languages.
Studies of creole languages around the world have suggested that they display remarkable similarities in grammar and are developed uniformly from pidgins in a single generation. These similarities are apparent even when creoles do not have any common language origins. In addition, creoles are similar, despite being developed in isolation from each other.
Syntactic similarities include
subject–verb–object word order. Even when creoles are derived from languages with a different word order they often develop the SVO word order. Creoles tend to have similar usage patterns for definite and indefinite articles, and similar movement rules for phrase structures even when the parent languages do not.
Evolutionary timeline
Primate communication
Field primatologists can give useful insights into
great ape
The Hominidae (), whose members are known as the great apes or hominids (), are a taxonomic family of primates that includes eight extant species in four genera: '' Pongo'' (the Bornean, Sumatran and Tapanuli orangutan); ''Gorilla'' (the east ...
communication in the wild.
An important finding is that nonhuman primates, including the other great apes, produce calls that are graded, as opposed to categorically differentiated, with listeners striving to evaluate subtle gradations in signallers' emotional and bodily states. Nonhuman apes seemingly find it extremely difficult to produce vocalisations in the absence of the corresponding emotional states.
In captivity, nonhuman apes have been taught rudimentary forms of sign language or have been persuaded to use
lexigrams—symbols that do not graphically resemble the corresponding words—on computer keyboards. Some nonhuman apes, such as
Kanzi
Kanzi (born October 28, 1980), also known by the lexigram (from the character 太), is a male bonobo who has been the subject of several studies on great ape language. According to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a primatologist who has studied the ...
, have been able to learn and use hundreds of lexigrams.
The
Broca's and
Wernicke's area
Wernicke's area (; ), also called Wernicke's speech area, is one of the two parts of the cerebral cortex that are linked to speech, the other being Broca's area. It is involved in the comprehension of written and spoken language, in contrast to B ...
s in the primate brain are responsible for controlling the muscles of the face, tongue, mouth, and larynx, as well as recognizing sounds. Primates are known to make "vocal calls", and these calls are generated by circuits in the
brainstem
The brainstem (or brain stem) is the posterior stalk-like part of the brain that connects the cerebrum with the spinal cord. In the human brain the brainstem is composed of the midbrain, the pons, and the medulla oblongata. The midbrain is cont ...
and
limbic system
The limbic system, also known as the paleomammalian cortex, is a set of brain structures located on both sides of the thalamus, immediately beneath the medial temporal lobe of the cerebrum primarily in the forebrain.Schacter, Daniel L. 2012. ''Ps ...
.
[Freeman, Scott; Jon C. Herron., ''Evolutionary Analysis'' (4th ed.), Pearson Education, Inc. (2007), pages 789–90]
In the wild, the communication of
vervet monkey
The vervet monkey (''Chlorocebus pygerythrus''), or simply vervet, is an Old World monkey of the family Cercopithecidae native to Africa. The term "vervet" is also used to refer to all the members of the genus ''Chlorocebus''. The five distinct ...
s has been the most extensively studied.
They are known to make up to ten different vocalizations. Many of these are used to warn other members of the group about approaching predators. They include a "leopard call", a "snake call", and an "eagle call".
Each call triggers a different defensive strategy in the monkeys who hear the call and scientists were able to elicit predictable responses from the monkeys using loudspeakers and prerecorded sounds. Other vocalisations may be used for identification. If an infant monkey calls, its mother turns toward it, but other vervet mothers turn instead toward that infant's mother to see what she will do.
Similarly, researchers have demonstrated that chimpanzees (in captivity) use different "words" in reference to different foods. They recorded vocalisations that chimps made in reference, for example, to grapes, and then other chimps pointed at pictures of grapes when they heard the recorded sound.
''Ardipithecus ramidus''
A study published in ''HOMO: Journal of Comparative Human Biology'' in 2017 claims that ''
Ardipithecus ramidus
''Ardipithecus ramidus'' is a species of australopithecine from the Afar region of Early Pliocene Ethiopia 4.4 million years ago (mya). ''A. ramidus'', unlike modern hominids, has adaptations for both walking on two legs ( bipedality) and life i ...
'', a hominin dated at approximately 4.5
Ma, shows the first evidence of an anatomical shift in the hominin lineage suggestive of increased vocal capability.
This study compared the skull of ''A. ramidus'' with 29 chimpanzee skulls of different ages and found that in numerous features ''A. ramidus'' clustered with the infant and juvenile measures as opposed to the adult measures. Significantly, such affinity with the shape dimensions of infant and juvenile chimpanzee skull architecture, it was argued, may have resulted in greater vocal capability. This assertion was based on the notion that the chimpanzee vocal tract ratios that prevent speech are a result of growth factors associated with puberty—growth factors absent in ''A. ramidus'' ontogeny. ''A. ramidus'' was also found to have a degree of
cervical
In anatomy, cervical is an adjective that has two meanings:
# of or pertaining to any neck.
# of or pertaining to the female cervix: i.e., the ''neck'' of the uterus.
*Commonly used medical phrases involving the neck are
**cervical collar
**cerv ...
lordosis
Lordosis is historically defined as an ''abnormal'' inward curvature of the lumbar spine. However, the terms ''lordosis'' and ''lordotic'' are also used to refer to the normal inward curvature of the lumbar and cervical regions of the human spi ...
more conducive to vocal modulation when compared with chimpanzees as well as cranial base architecture suggestive of increased vocal capability.
What was significant in this study was the observation that the changes in skull architecture that correlate with reduced aggression are the same changes necessary for the evolution of early hominin vocal ability. In integrating data on anatomical correlates of primate mating and social systems with studies of skull and vocal tract architecture that facilitate speech production, the authors argue that
paleoanthropologists
Paleoanthropology or paleo-anthropology is a branch of paleontology and anthropology which seeks to understand the early development of anatomically modern humans, a process known as hominization, through the reconstruction of evolutionary kinship ...
to date have failed to understand the important relationship between early hominin social evolution and language capacity.
While the skull of ''A. ramidus'', according to the authors, lacks the anatomical impediments to speech evident in chimpanzees, it is unclear what the vocal capabilities of this early hominin were. While they suggest ''A. ramidus''—based on similar vocal tract ratios—may have had vocal capabilities equivalent to a modern human infant or very young child, they concede this is obviously a debatable and speculative hypothesis. However, they do claim that changes in skull architecture through processes of social selection were a necessary prerequisite for language evolution. As they write:
Early Homo
Anatomically, some scholars believe that features of
bipedalism
Bipedalism is a form of terrestrial locomotion where an organism moves by means of its two rear limbs or legs. An animal or machine that usually moves in a bipedal manner is known as a biped , meaning 'two feet' (from Latin ''bis'' 'double' a ...
developed in the
australopithecine
Australopithecina or Hominina is a subtribe in the tribe Hominini. The members of the subtribe are generally ''Australopithecus'' (cladistically including the genus, genera ''Homo'', ''Paranthropus'', and ''Kenyanthropus''), and it typically in ...
s around 3.5 million years ago. Around this time, these structural developments within the skull led to a more prominently L-shaped vocal tract. In order to generate the sounds modern homo sapiens are capable of making, such as vowels, it is vital that Early Homo populations must have a specifically shaped voice track and a lower sitting larynx. Opposing research previously suggested that Neanderthals were physically incapable of creating the full range of vocals seen in modern humans due to the differences in larynx placement. Establishing distinct larynx positions through fossil remains of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals would support this theory; however, modern research has revealed that the hyoid bone was indistinguishable from the two populations. Though research has shown a lower sitting larynx is important to producing speech, another theory states it may not be as important as once thought. Cataldo, Migliano, & Vinicius (2018) stated that speech may have emerged due to an increase in trade and communication between different groups. Another view by Cataldo states that speech was evolved to enable tool-making by the Neanderthals.
Archaic Homo ''sapiens''
Steven Mithen
Steven Mithen, (born 16 October 1960) is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading. He has written a number of books, including ''The Singing Neanderthals'' and ''The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion ...
proposed the term ''Hmmmmm'' for the pre-linguistic system of communication posited to have been used by archaic ''
Homo
''Homo'' () is the genus that emerged in the (otherwise extinct) genus ''Australopithecus'' that encompasses the extant species ''Homo sapiens'' ( modern humans), plus several extinct species classified as either ancestral to or closely relate ...
'', beginning with ''
Homo ergaster
''Homo ergaster'' is an extinct species or subspecies of archaic humans who lived in Africa in the Early Pleistocene. Whether ''H. ergaster'' constitutes a species of its own or should be subsumed into ''Homo erectus, H. erectus'' is an ongoin ...
'' and reaching the highest sophistication in the
Middle Pleistocene
The Chibanian, widely known by its previous designation of Middle Pleistocene, is an age in the international geologic timescale or a stage in chronostratigraphy, being a division of the Pleistocene Epoch within the ongoing Quaternary Period. The ...
with ''
Homo heidelbergensis
''Homo heidelbergensis'' (also ''H. sapiens heidelbergensis''), sometimes called Heidelbergs, is an extinct species or subspecies of archaic human which existed during the Middle Pleistocene. It was subsumed as a subspecies of ''H. erectus'' in ...
'' and ''
Homo neanderthalensis
Neanderthals (, also ''Homo neanderthalensis'' and erroneously ''Homo sapiens neanderthalensis''), also written as Neandertals, are an Extinction, extinct species or subspecies of archaic humans who lived in Eurasia until about 40,000 years ag ...
''. ''Hmmmmm'' is an acronym for ''h''olistic (non-compositional), ''m''anipulative (utterances are commands or suggestions, not descriptive statements), ''m''ulti-''m''odal (acoustic as well as gestural and facial),
''m''usical, and ''m''imetic.
Homo ''erectus''
Evidence for
Homo ''erectus'' potentially using language comes in the form of
Acheulean
Acheulean (; also Acheulian and Mode II), from the French ''acheuléen'' after the type site of Saint-Acheul, is an archaeological industry of stone tool manufacture characterized by the distinctive oval and pear-shaped "hand axes" associated ...
tool usage. The use of abstract thought in the formation of Acheulean hand axes coincides with the symbol creation necessary for simple language. Recent language theories present
recursion
Recursion (adjective: ''recursive'') occurs when a thing is defined in terms of itself or of its type. Recursion is used in a variety of disciplines ranging from linguistics to logic. The most common application of recursion is in mathematics ...
as the unique facet of human language and theory of mind. However, breaking down language into its symbolic parts: separating meaning from the requirements of grammar, it becomes possible to see that language does not depend on either recursion or
grammar
In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structure, structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clause (linguistics), clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraint ...
. This can be evidenced by the
Pirahã language users in Brazil that have no myth or creation stories, no numbers and no colors within their language. This is to highlight that even though grammar may have been unavailable, use of foresight, planning and symbolic thought can be evidence of language as early as one million years ago with Homo ''erectus''.
Homo ''heidelbergensis''
''Homo heidelbergensis'' was a close relative (most probably a migratory descendant) of ''
Homo ergaster
''Homo ergaster'' is an extinct species or subspecies of archaic humans who lived in Africa in the Early Pleistocene. Whether ''H. ergaster'' constitutes a species of its own or should be subsumed into ''Homo erectus, H. erectus'' is an ongoin ...
''. Some researchers believe this species to be the first hominin to make controlled vocalisations, possibly mimicking animal vocalisations,
and that as ''Homo heidelbergensis'' developed more sophisticated culture, proceeded from this point and possibly developed an early form of symbolic language.
Homo ''neanderthalensis''
The discovery in 1989 of the (Neanderthal) Kebara 2 hyoid bone suggests that Neanderthals may have been anatomically capable of producing sounds similar to modern humans.
The
hypoglossal nerve
The hypoglossal nerve, also known as the twelfth cranial nerve, cranial nerve XII, or simply CN XII, is a cranial nerve that innervates all the extrinsic and intrinsic muscles of the tongue except for the palatoglossus, which is innervated by ...
, which passes through the hypoglossal canal, controls the movements of the tongue, which may have enabled voicing for size exaggeration (see size exaggeration hypothesis below) or may reflect speech abilities.
However, although Neanderthals may have been anatomically able to speak,
Richard G. Klein
Richard G. Klein (born April 11, 1941) is a Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Stanford University. He is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences. He earned his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1 ...
in 2004 doubted that they possessed a fully modern language. He largely bases his doubts on the fossil record of archaic humans and their stone tool kit. Bart de Boer in 2017 acknowledges this ambiguity of a universally accepted Neanderthal vocal tract; however, he notes the similarities in the thoracic vertebral canal, potential air sacs, and hyoid bones between modern humans and Neanderthals to suggest the presence of complex speech. For two million years following the emergence of ''Homo habilis'', the stone tool technology of hominins changed very little. Klein, who has worked extensively on ancient stone tools, describes the crude stone tool kit of archaic humans as impossible to break down into categories based on their function, and reports that Neanderthals seem to have had little concern for the final aesthetic form of their tools. Klein argues that the Neanderthal brain may have not reached the level of complexity required for modern speech, even if the physical apparatus for speech production was well-developed.
The issue of the Neanderthal's level of cultural and technological sophistication remains a controversial one.
Based on computer simulations used to evaluate that evolution of language that resulted in showing three stages in the evolution of syntax, Neanderthals are thought to have been in stage 2, showing they had something more evolved than proto-language but not quite as complex as the language of modern humans.
Some researchers, applying auditory bioengineering models to computerised tomography scans of Neanderthal skulls, have asserted that Neanderthals had auditory capacity very similar to that of anatomically modern humans.
These researchers claim that this finding implies that "Neanderthals evolved the auditory capacities to support a vocal communication system as efficient as modern human speech."
Homo ''sapiens''
Anatomically modern humans begin to
appear in the fossil record in Ethiopia some 200,000 years ago.
Although there is still much debate as to whether behavioural modernity emerged in Africa at around the same time, a growing number of archaeologists nowadays invoke the southern African Middle Stone Age use of red ochre pigments—for example at
Blombos Cave—as evidence that modern anatomy and behaviour co-evolved. These archaeologists argue strongly that if modern humans at this early stage were using red ochre pigments for ritual and symbolic purposes, they probably had symbolic language as well.
According to the
recent African origins hypothesis, from around 60,000 – 50,000 years ago a group of humans left Africa and began migrating to occupy the rest of the world, carrying language and symbolic culture with them.
The descended larynx
The ''
larynx
The larynx (), commonly called the voice box, is an organ in the top of the neck involved in breathing, producing sound and protecting the trachea against food aspiration. The opening of larynx into pharynx known as the laryngeal inlet is about ...
'' or ''voice box'' is an organ in the neck housing the
vocal folds
In humans, vocal cords, also known as vocal folds or voice reeds, are folds of throat tissues that are key in creating sounds through vocalization. The size of vocal cords affects the pitch of voice. Open when breathing and vibrating for speech ...
, which are responsible for
phonation
The term phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, ''phonation'' is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the defini ...
. In humans, the larynx is ''descended''. The human species is not unique in this respect: goats, dogs, pigs and tamarins lower the larynx temporarily, to emit loud calls.
Several deer species have a permanently lowered larynx, which may be lowered still further by males during their roaring displays.
Lions, jaguars, cheetahs and domestic cats also do this.
However, laryngeal descent in nonhumans (according to Philip Lieberman) is not accompanied by descent of the hyoid; hence the tongue remains horizontal in the oral cavity, preventing it from acting as a pharyngeal articulator.
Despite all this, scholars remain divided as to how "special" the human vocal tract really is. It has been shown that the larynx does descend to some extent during development in chimpanzees, followed by hyoidal descent.
As against this, Philip Lieberman points out that only humans have evolved permanent and substantial laryngeal descent in association with hyoidal descent, resulting in a curved tongue and two-tube vocal tract with 1:1 proportions. He argues that Neanderthals and early anatomically modern humans could not have possessed supralaryngeal vocal tracts capable of producing "fully human speech". Uniquely in the human case, simple contact between the
epiglottis
The epiglottis is a leaf-shaped flap in the throat that prevents food and water from entering the trachea and the lungs. It stays open during breathing, allowing air into the larynx. During swallowing, it closes to prevent aspiration of food int ...
and
velum
Velum may refer to:
Human anatomy
* Superior medullary velum, anterior medullary velum or valve of Vieussens, white matter, in the brain, which stretches between the superior cerebellar peduncles
** Frenulum of superior medullary velum, a sligh ...
is no longer possible, disrupting the normal mammalian separation of the respiratory and digestive tracts during swallowing. Since this entails substantial costs—increasing the risk of choking while swallowing food—we are forced to ask what benefits might have outweighed those costs. The obvious benefit—so it is claimed—must have been speech. But this idea has been vigorously contested. One objection is that humans are in fact not seriously at risk of choking on food: medical statistics indicate that accidents of this kind are extremely rare. Another objection is that in the view of most scholars, speech as it is known emerged relatively late in human evolution, roughly contemporaneously with the emergence of ''Homo sapiens''.
A development as complex as the reconfiguration of the human vocal tract would have required much more time, implying an early date of origin. This discrepancy in timescales undermines the idea that human vocal flexibility was initially driven by selection pressures for speech, thus not excluding that it was selected for e.g. improved singing ability.
The size exaggeration hypothesis
To lower the larynx is to increase the length of the vocal tract, in turn lowering
formant
In speech science and phonetics, a formant is the broad spectral maximum that results from an acoustic resonance of the human vocal tract. In acoustics, a formant is usually defined as a broad peak, or local maximum, in the spectrum. For harmoni ...
frequencies so that the voice sounds "deeper"—giving an impression of greater size. John Ohala argues that the function of the lowered larynx in humans, especially males, is probably to enhance threat displays rather than speech itself. Ohala points out that if the lowered larynx were an adaptation for speech, adult human males would be expected to be better adapted in this respect than adult females, whose larynx is considerably less low. However, females outperform males in verbal tests, falsifying this whole line of reasoning.
W. Tecumseh Fitch
William Tecumseh Sherman Fitch III (born 1963)http://homepage.univie.ac.at/tecumseh.fitch/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/FitchCV2011.pdf is an American evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Vienna (Vienna, Austria) where ...
likewise argues that this was the original selective advantage of laryngeal lowering in the human species. Although (according to Fitch) the initial lowering of the larynx in humans had nothing to do with speech, the increased range of possible formant patterns was subsequently co-opted for speech. Size exaggeration remains the sole function of the extreme laryngeal descent observed in male deer. Consistent with the size exaggeration hypothesis, a second descent of the larynx occurs at puberty in humans, although only in males. In response to the objection that the larynx is descended in human females, Fitch suggests that mothers vocalizing to protect their infants would also have benefited from this ability.
Phonemic diversity
In 2011, Quentin Atkinson published a survey of
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
s from 500 different languages as well as
language families
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in hi ...
and compared their phonemic diversity by region, number of speakers and distance from Africa. The survey revealed that African languages had the largest number of phonemes, and
Oceania
Oceania (, , ) is a region, geographical region that includes Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Spanning the Eastern Hemisphere, Eastern and Western Hemisphere, Western hemispheres, Oceania is estimated to have a land area of ...
and South America had the smallest number. After allowing for the number of speakers, the phonemic diversity was compared to over 2000 possible origin locations. Atkinson's "best fit" model is that language originated in central and southern Africa between 80,000 and 160,000 years ago. This predates the hypothesized
southern coastal peopling of Arabia, India, southeast Asia, and Australia. It would also mean that the origin of language occurred at the same time as the emergence of symbolic culture.
History
In religion and mythology
The search for the origin of language has a long history in
mythology
Myth is a folklore genre consisting of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or origin myths. Since "myth" is widely used to imply that a story is not objectively true, the identification of a narrat ...
. Most mythologies do not credit humans with the invention of language but speak of a
divine language
Divine language, the language of the gods, or, in monotheism, the language of God (or angels), is the concept of a mystical or divine proto-language, which predates and supersedes human speech.
Abrahamic traditions
In Judaism and Christianity ...
predating human language. Mystical languages used to communicate with animals or spirits, such as the
language of the birds
In Abrahamic and European mythology, medieval literature and occultism, the language of the birds is postulated as a mystical, perfect divine language, Adamic language, Enochian, angelic language or a mythical or magical language used by birds ...
, are also common, and were of particular interest during the
Renaissance
The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ideas ...
.
Vāc
Vacha ( sa, वाच्, '), a Vedic goddess is a personified form of speech. She enters into the inspired poets and visionaries, gives expression and energy to those she loves; she is called the "mother of the Vedas" and consort of Prajapati, th ...
is the Hindu goddess of speech, or "speech personified". As
Brahman
In Hinduism, ''Brahman'' ( sa, ब्रह्मन्) connotes the highest universal principle, the ultimate reality in the universe.P. T. Raju (2006), ''Idealistic Thought of India'', Routledge, , page 426 and Conclusion chapter part X ...
's "sacred utterance", she has a cosmological role as the "Mother of the
Veda
FIle:Atharva-Veda samhita page 471 illustration.png, upright=1.2, The Vedas are ancient Sanskrit texts of Hinduism. Above: A page from the ''Atharvaveda''.
The Vedas (, , ) are a large body of religious texts originating in ancient India. Co ...
s". The
Aztecs
The Aztecs () were a Mesoamerican culture that flourished in central Mexico in the post-classic period from 1300 to 1521. The Aztec people included different Indigenous peoples of Mexico, ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those g ...
' story maintains that only a man,
Coxcox In Aztec mythology, Coxcox was the only male survivor of a worldwide flood.
The Aztecs believed that only Coxcox and his wife, Xochiquetzal, survived the flood. They took refuge in the hollow trunk of a cypress, which floated on top of the water ...
, and a woman,
Xochiquetzal, survived a flood, having floated on a piece of bark. They found themselves on land and had many children who were at first born unable to speak, but subsequently, upon the arrival of a dove, were endowed with language, although each one was given a different speech such that they could not understand one another.
In the Old Testament, the Book of Genesis (11) says that God prevented the
Tower of Babel
The Tower of Babel ( he, , ''Mīgdal Bāḇel'') narrative in Genesis 11:1–9 is an origin myth meant to explain why the world's peoples speak different languages.
According to the story, a united human race speaking a single language and mi ...
from being completed through a miracle that made its construction workers start speaking different languages. After this, they migrated to other regions, grouped together according to which of the newly created languages they spoke, explaining the origins of languages and nations outside of the
Fertile Crescent
The Fertile Crescent ( ar, الهلال الخصيب) is a crescent-shaped region in the Middle East, spanning modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan, together with the northern region of Kuwait, southeastern region of ...
.
Historical experiments
History contains a number of anecdotes about people who attempted to discover the origin of language by experiment. The first such tale was told by
Herodotus
Herodotus ( ; grc, , }; BC) was an ancient Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire (now Bodrum, Turkey) and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria ( Italy). He is known f ...
(''
Histories'' 2.2). He relates that Pharaoh Psammetichus (probably
Psammetichus I
Wahibre Psamtik I ( Ancient Egyptian: ) was the first pharaoh of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty of Egypt, the Saite period, ruling from the city of Sais in the Nile delta between 664–610 BC. He was installed by Ashurbanipal of the Neo-Assyrian Empir ...
, 7th century BC) had two children raised by a shepherd, with the instructions that no one should speak to them, but that the shepherd should feed and care for them while listening to determine their first words. When one of the children cried "bekos" with outstretched arms the shepherd concluded that the word was
Phrygian, because that was the sound of the Phrygian word for "bread". From this, Psammetichus concluded that the first language was Phrygian. King
James V of Scotland
James V (10 April 1512 – 14 December 1542) was List of Scottish monarchs, King of Scotland from 9 September 1513 until his death in 1542. He was crowned on 21 September 1513 at the age of seventeen months. James was the son of James IV of Sco ...
is said to have tried a similar experiment; his children were supposed to have spoken
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
.
Both the medieval monarch
Frederick II and
Akbar
Abu'l-Fath Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar (25 October 1542 – 27 October 1605), popularly known as Akbar the Great ( fa, ), and also as Akbar I (), was the third Mughal emperor, who reigned from 1556 to 1605. Akbar succeeded his father, Hum ...
are said to have tried similar experiments; the children involved in these experiments did not speak. The current situation of deaf people also points into this direction.
History of research
Modern linguistics did not begin until the late 18th century, and the
Romantic or
animist
Animism (from Latin: ' meaning 'breath, Soul, spirit, life') is the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct Spirituality, spiritual essence. Potentially, animism perceives all things—Animal, animals, Plant, plants, Ro ...
theses of
Johann Gottfried Herder
Johann Gottfried von Herder ( , ; 25 August 174418 December 1803) was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the Enlightenment, ''Sturm und Drang'', and Weimar Classicism.
Biography
Born in Mohrun ...
and
Johann Christoph Adelung
Johann Christoph Adelung (8 August 173210 September 1806) was a German grammarian and philologist.
Biography
He was born at Spantekow, in Western Pomerania, and educated at schools in Anklam and Berge Monastery, Magdeburg, and the University ...
remained influential well into the 19th century. The question of language origin seemed inaccessible to methodical approaches, and in 1866 the
Linguistic Society of Paris famously banned all discussion of the origin of language, deeming it to be an unanswerable problem. An increasingly systematic approach to
historical linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
# to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
# ...
developed in the course of the 19th century, reaching its culmination in the
Neogrammarian
The Neogrammarians (German: ''Junggrammatiker'', 'young grammarians') were a German school of linguists, originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change ...
school of
Karl Brugmann
Karl Brugmann (16 March 1849 – 29 June 1919) was a German linguist. He is noted for his work in Indo-European linguistics.
Biography
He was educated at the universities of Halle and Leipzig. He taught at the gymnasium at Wiesbaden and at Le ...
and others.
However, scholarly interest in the question of the origin of language has only gradually been rekindled from the 1950s on (and then controversially) with ideas such as
universal grammar
Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible hum ...
,
mass comparison
Mass comparison is a method developed by Joseph Greenberg to determine the level of genetic relatedness between languages. It is now usually called multilateral comparison. The method is rejected by most linguists , though not all.
Some of the to ...
and
glottochronology Glottochronology (from Attic Greek γλῶττα ''tongue, language'' and χρόνος ''time'') is the part of lexicostatistics which involves comparative linguistics and deals with the chronological relationship between languages.Sheila Embleton ( ...
.
The "origin of language" as a subject in its own right emerged from studies in
neurolinguistics
Neurolinguistics is the study of neural mechanisms in the human brain that controls the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics draws methods and theories from fields such as n ...
,
psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind ...
and
human evolution
Human evolution is the evolutionary process within the history of primates that led to the emergence of ''Homo sapiens'' as a distinct species of the hominid family, which includes the great apes. This process involved the gradual development of ...
. The ''
Linguistic Bibliography
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
'' introduced "Origin of language" as a separate heading in 1988, as a sub-topic of psycholinguistics. Dedicated research institutes of
evolutionary linguistics
Evolutionary linguistics or Darwinian linguistics is a sociobiological approach to the study of language. Evolutionary linguists consider linguistics as a subfield of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. The approach is also closely linked ...
are a recent phenomenon, emerging only in the 1990s.
See also
*
Abiogenesis
In biology, abiogenesis (from a- 'not' + Greek bios 'life' + genesis 'origin') or the origin of life is the natural process by which life has arisen from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds. The prevailing scientific hypothes ...
*
Biolinguistics
Biolinguistics can be defined as the study of biology and the evolution of language. It is highly interdisciplinary as it is related to various fields such as biology, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, mathematics, and neurolinguistics to ex ...
*
Bouba/kiki effect
The bouba/kiki effect is a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects. It was first documented by Wolfgang Köhler in 1929 using nonsense words. The effect has been observed in American university students, Tamil ...
*
Bow-wow theory
*
Digital infinity
* ''
Essay on the Origin of Languages
''Essay on the Origin of Languages'' (french: Essai sur l'origine des langues) is an essay by Jean-Jacques Rousseau published posthumously in 1781. Rousseau had meant to publish the essay in a short volume which was also to include essays ''On The ...
''
*
Evolutionary psychology of language
*
FOXP2 and human evolution
*
Generative anthropology
Generative anthropology is a field of study based on the hypothesis that the origin of human language happened in a singular event. The discipline of Generative Anthropology centers upon this original event which Eric Gans calls The Originary Scen ...
*
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
# to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
# ...
*
Neurobiological origins of language
*
Origins of society The origins of society — the evolutionary emergence of distinctively human social organization — is an important topic within evolutionary biology, anthropology, prehistory and palaeolithic archaeology. While little is known for certain, debates ...
*
Origin of speech
*
Proto-language
In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattest ...
*
Theory of language
Theory of language is a topic from Philosophy of language#Nature of language, philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. It has the goal of answering the questions "What is language?"; "Why do languages have the properties they have?"; or ...
References
Further reading
External links
Origin of Language – Givens, David B.Behavioral and Biological Origins of Modern Humans – Klein, Richard G.Speaking in Tongues: The History of LanguageDecoding Chomsky: Science and revolutionary politics – Chris Knight
{{DEFAULTSORT:Origin Of Language
Human evolution
Paleolithic
Unsolved problems in linguistics
Causes of events
Theories of language
Origins