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What is language origins?
Where and when did language start?
Did language originate only once?
How did human language evolve?
The "origin of language" as a subject in its own right emerged from studies in neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics and human evolution. The Linguistic Bibliography introduced "Origin of language" as a separate heading in 1988, as a sub-topic of psycholinguistics.
- The Bow-Wow Theory
- The Ding-Dong Theory
- The La-La Theory
- The Pooh-Pooh Theory
- The Yo-He-Ho Theory
- Will We Ever Discover The Origin of Language?
- The Evolution of Human Language
According to this theory, language began when our ancestors started imitating the natural sounds around them. The first speech was onomatopoeic—marked by echoic words such as moo, meow, splash, cuckoo, and bang. So what's wrong with this theory? Well, relatively few words are onomatopoeic, and these words vary from one language to another. For inst...
This theory, favored by ancient philosophers Plato and Pythagoras, maintains that speech arose in response to the essential qualities of objects in the environment. The original sounds people made were supposedly in harmony with the world around them. Apart from some rare instances of sound symbolism, there is no persuasive evidence, in any languag...
Danish linguistOtto Jespersen suggested that language may have developed from sounds associated with love, play, and (especially) song. As David Crystal notes in "How Language Works," this theory still fails to account for "... the gap between the emotional and the rational aspects of speech expression... ."
This theory holds that speech originated with interjections—spontaneous cries of pain ("Ouch!"), surprise ("Oh!"), and other emotions ("Yabba dabba do!"). However, no language contains very many interjections, and, Crystal points out that the clicks, intakes of breath, and other noises used in this way "bear little relationship to the vowels and co...
According to this theory, language evolved from the grunts, groans, and snorts evoked by heavy physical labor. Though this notion may account for some of the rhythmic features of the language, it doesn't go very far in explaining where words come from.
As American linguist Peter Farb wrote in "Word Play: What Happens When People Talk," virtually all these theories "have serious flaws, and none can withstand the scrutiny of present knowledge about the structure of language and about the evolution of our species." But does this mean that allquestions about the origin of language are unanswerable? N...
Still curious about language? There are several other theoriesabout the origin and evolution of human language. Among other things considered, physical adaptations in humans, such as changes in teeth, lips, and the larynx, as well as theories on the role of gestures and social bonding, contribute to the ongoing debate on the evolution of language.
Apr 16, 2011 · A recent study conducted by Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, suggests two very important findings: language originated only once, and the specific place of origin may be southwestern Africa.
The evolution of languages or history of language includes the evolution, divergence and development of languages throughout time, as reconstructed based on glottochronology, comparative linguistics, written records and other historical linguistics techniques.
Apr 26, 2018 · The expression language origins refers to theories pertaining to the emergence and development of language in human societies. Over the centuries, many theories have been put forward—and almost all of them have been challenged, discounted, and ridiculed. (See Where Does Language Come From?)
- Richard Nordquist
While we know that language first appeared among Homo sapiens somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000 years ago, the secret to how language evolved is still unknown, and mainstream theories fall into two distinctly different camps.
Aug 21, 2014 · The common ancestor of English, Latin, Greek, Russian, Gaelic, Hindi, and many other languages spoken in Europe and India is known as Proto-Indo-European, whereas the more recent common...
