Language is incredibly diverse in our world. There are around 7,000 spoken languages in the world right now and a few dozen of them are known by just a single person. As many as 90% are spoken by less than 100,000 people. Dozens of other languages are officially extinct with no one left to speak them at all.
We’re so used to language in our modern world that people will go out and create fictional languages for our own entertainment, like Dothraki or Klingon. There are actually more people in the world right now who can speak Klingon than Navajo, which you may recognize as a real language with a long history.
With such incredible diversity and complexity it’s a very deep process to get to the bottom of where it all started. But it did have to start somewhere. Once upon a time, someone (or several someones) was the first ever to give voice to a thought, to label something in an identifiable way in an attempt to communicate what a thing or a feeling or an idea was.
Without the benefit of time travel it’s hard to get a lot of definitive answers on this subject. There is actually quite a bit of disagreement in the study of linguistics over a number of facets dealing with the origin and evolution of language so we’ll try to cover what we can while keeping it balanced.
It seems plausible that language, like life, has a common ancestor, meaning it evolved from a single place, not in several. Some believe that southern Africa is that place. Research has shown that the largest number of phonemes, the smallest sort of perceptually distinct sounds in speech, are found in Africa while the fewest are in South America.
Human vs Animal Communication
Many animals are able to communicate but human language has transcended animals on several levels. We are the only species that can express whole thoughts in sentences, rather than simple ideas like warnings or cries of distress. Human language is compositional and can be combined in nearly infinite ways to express infinite ideas.
The important thing to start with when answering a question like this is to point out we don’t have an actual answer. No one does. Asking when language began is a lot like asking who invented fire or the wheel. It’s impossible to know. It will also always be impossible to know. This isn’t one of those things waiting for an archaeologist to dig it up some day, that just can’t happen. So speculation, however educated and backed by research, is the best we’ll ever have.
Also, consider that the only person who could document when language began was the person who invented language, and they probably hadn’t mastered book writing on that same day or anything. In fact, writing and speaking were distinct creations and while humans began to evolve as far back as 300,000 years ago, writing only showed up about 5,000 years ago. This is distinct from cave paintings and symbols which, while about to convey meaning and appeared as late as 40,000 years ago, were not a distinct written language yet.
It seems 300,000 years is about the earliest, which can range all the way up to 200,000 years, and aligns with the Laryngeal Descent Theory, that our voice box evolved to be where it is, allowing a vocal tract capable of producing speech.
It’s worth noting, however, that research has proven even some modern apes are anatomically capable of producing human words. Because of this, some argue speech, or the ability to produce it, dates back to a common ancestor as much as 27 million years ago. This clashes distinctly with additional research that bumps speech up to only 70,000 years ago. In this theory, humans only communicated in click sounds before changes in geography and diet led to alterations in the physical language structures in the throat and brain and the evolution of more complex speech about 50,000 years ago.
Just because we don’t know exactly who started speaking and writing and exactly when doesn’t mean we don’t know anything, though. At the very least, we have some educated guesses.
How Did it Start?
Language wasn’t invented the way Scotch tape or dynamite was invented. There was no eureka moment when someone just started speaking. Because of how complex language is, it’s generally believed that the process of language evolved just as humans evolved from less advanced beings to more advanced ones.
Our cousins, like the Neanderthals, may have started developing language alongside or before homo sapiens. But they didn’t make it this far in history so it’s hard to know for certain, while a lack of symbols or art in their fossil remains indicates they may not have had language.
Noam Chomsky argued that humans are essentially hard-wired for language. From birth, our brain is designed to learn and make use of it. We’ll get more into his theories later. For what it’s worth, an Egyptian Pharaoh Psammetichus I concluded essentially the same thing about 2600 years ago.
Origin Theories
There are a variety of theories about what kick-started language in the first place. A number of them, and we’ll dive into a few that have subtle differences, basically suggest language started as noise. We started making noises and ascribed those noises to things that had importance.
One of these theories, called the Mama Theory, explains it well enough in simple terms. Babies start making the “mmm” and “mama” sounds on their own. Those sounds, repeated by enough people over enough time can become accepted and adapted to the word “Mama” and eventually “mother,” for instance.
Many of the theories, like the Bow Wow Theory, suggest we mimic sounds we hear in nature, fall apart under any serious scrutiny as very few words in any language can be accounted for in this way.
There are a handful of similar and fairly rudimentary theories about the origin of language that all have silly names like Ding-Dong, La-La and Pooh-Pooh, all of which fail to adequately account for most of the elements of language.
Differing Theories
More complex theories of language development rely on the cooperative nature of humans. We are inclined, as a species, to want to collaborate and understand one another. This led to a theory that language may have developed from gestures and pantomime. Babies and apes still engage in this sort of behavior, of pointing to things and trying to express thoughts.
As an example of how these gestures and motions develop language, in this case, sign language, which would then evolve to spoken language, there are cases of entirely deaf communities spontaneously creating their own sign languages to communicate.
In this theory, language isn’t an innate thing, instead the cooperative social interaction is the foundation of language, which doesn’t even require speech or writing. All of that comes after and then is passed down culturally.
What some of these theories do try to get to the root of is the difference between signs and symbols which are essential parts of language. A sign has a clear meaning that can be easily discerned. A stop sign is very clear meant to convey the idea “stop.” In the modern world, a smiley emoji is a clear sign meant to indicate happiness.
A symbol is a more abstract concept and can change with context. Words are basic symbols which we all understand. “Hot” is a word that can change in context. It might refer to temperature, it might refer to attractiveness, it could mean something is popular, or that it’s stolen.
The simplistic theories of language try to explain how signs and symbols evolve into language but miss the mark in many cases. Like the Pooh-Pooh Theory which suggests language began from interjections, like when you cry “ow!” after getting hurt. It’s hard to get this sort of theory to explain words like “daffodil” or “unguent,” however.
Ritual and Speech Evolution
Ritual and speech coevolution is another more complex theory of how language evolved in humans. It is believed that the earliest forms of man found benefit in gathering to engage in rituals and group behaviors that would benefit them as a whole. Like animals, in particular other ape species, communication would have first been in the realm of gestures.
It was the continued grouping of early humans, engaging in various rituals and ascribing meaning to their gestures and symbols that could have helped language begin to develop across a group and make it a shared thing that was understood by many and could therefore be taught to others outside that initial group.
One way in which speech was able to potentially evolve for us, as opposed to apes who have a limited range of vocalization and meanings, deals with trust. An ape, or any animal, typically only has a limited number of vocalizations to indicate stress, fear, hunger, surprise and so on. These sounds can’t typically be faked. Humans, however, can engage in deception and have reason to doubt one another. But trust in a group allows early humans to relax any potential fears and trust that they are agreeing on a shared meaning for a wider range of things.
Tools and Language
One of the more novel theories on language development relates also to the development of tools. In a gross simplification of this theory, the idea is that humans developed the ability to make tools and also needed a way to communicate to each other about what they were doing so language was born out of necessity. In so many words, someone invented an ax and wanted to tell his friends what it was for and how he did it. Again, that’s a gross simplification, but it’s the heart of the theory.
In more complex readings of the theory, there is some breakdown of the idea that tool-making was part of the evolution and growth of the human brain, and manual praxis is linked to language development, Neuroscience agrees that language parts of the brain are also used, in part, for non-language functions that include tool use. So there is some potential link between the growth and development of one along with the other.
Chomsky and Universal Grammar
We mentioned Noam Chomsky earlier. In 1957, he proposed that all humans are born with an innate understanding of how language works. This was very much opposed to reigning theories of language development and acquisition of the day. He believed, regardless of the language being learned, we are able to learn because our brains are genetically coded for it. We are born to understand communication in whatever form it takes.
This concept had been, more or less, accepted by most linguists for half a century. His basic arguments of universal grammar are convincing. Most languages break down into parts like nouns, verbs and adjectives. They are recursive, meaning we can embed one language structure inside another endlessly, like adding adjectives to describe a noun in a sentence. They are also easily learned by children. These things occur across cultures.
More recent research casts doubt on Chomsky’s theories. Linguistics and cognitive scientists have studied how children learn language and their findings contradict Chomsky’s theories. Children use techniques that are not unique to language, like classifying what they encounter into different categories, which help them build an understanding of language.
What conclusion can you draw in the end with the debate between linguists? That the origins of language are really hard to figure out.