The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel tells of how God created the languages of the world to confuse the people as punishment for their blasphemous building project.
Many ancient stories describe a similar divine origin for languages spoken by humans, in an attempt to explain a problem that has puzzled humans for generations.Though more modern theories don’t involve any divine intervention, there is disagreement as scholars attempt to answer this question.
Edmund Blair Bolles, author and editor of Babel’s Dawn, a blog devoted to news about language origins – explains how the topic was taboo for a very long time.
“In the 1860s, the [Linguistics Society of Paris] announced that they would not allow papers on the subject as it was supposedly impossible to solve,” said Bolles.
It wasn’t until the 1950s that the issue was re-opened, Bolles added.
“Back then, the study of linguistics was dominated by [Noam] Chomsky’s kind of work,” he said.
Chomsky’s linguistic research is focused on grammar, and requires that humans have an innate knowledge of language naturally within them, according to Bolles.
He noted that though this theory had once been dominant it has begun to lose influence as more people study the problem from biological and anthropological perspectives.
“What’s wrong with [Chomsky’s] theory is that it’s apparently by magic that humans are all of a sudden able to start talking,” said Robert Logan, a professor who specializes in linguistics at the University of Toronto. His 2007 book, The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind, and Culture, describes how human language evolves as a response to an increasingly complex lifestyle.
When mankind’s ancestors emerged in the savannas of Africa, they were forced to adapt new skills and habits like living in groups, hunting, and controlling fire in order to survive, Logan said.
“The hominid mind could no longer cope with the richness of its life . . . a new abstract level of order emerged in the form of verbal language and conceptual thinking.”
In any case, this original language would likely sound nothing like what we speak today. Luke McCrohon is a final year PhD student at Tokyo University and studies how languages evolve and change.
“None of our modern languages came spontaneously into existence as far as we know,” he said. “They can all be traced back along certain family trees.”
Though he acknowledged there was likely an original language at the root of this family tree, it’s close to impossible to verify this as the history of language stretches back thousands of years, with little tangible evidence.
