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How did language start?
Where did the English language come from?
Did language originate only once?
When did human language begin?
How do we study the origins of language?
Who invented language?
Atkinson's "best fit" model is that language originated in western, central, or 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.
English is a West Germanic language that originated from Ingvaeonic languages brought to Britain in the mid-5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands.
- 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.
- Richard Nordquist
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.
Oct 12, 2017 · We chose to concentrate on the Austronesian language family (a huge family of languages mostly distributed along a broad arc from Taiwan to Easter Island) because quite a lot is known about how it spread. With a decent model of the history of a language family it becomes possible to uncover the processes of change within these languages.
Feb 3, 2016 · To those of us who study human evolution, this incredible universality suggests that our species has had language right from when Homo sapiens arose in Africa between 200,000 and 160,000 years...
Dec 11, 2022 · The indication is that human language was a fairly late acquisition of Homo sapiens. It is argued in this study that language, as we know it today, probably began to emerge about 20,000 years...
