One of the most remarkable aspects of being human is that we possess the ability to use language. It is well established in the fields of linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy that language is a unique human trait (Pinker, 1994; Tomasello, 2008). Yet what is often left unaddressed is just how rare and special this ability is. The formation of simple sounds is something that many species are capable of, but the expression of coherent thoughts and the sharing of complex societal structures are something that only humans do. We are, in essence, the Chatty Cathys of the natural world.
For a long time, people viewed language through the lens of religious explanations like the divine source theory. The account of the Tower of Babel in the Bible tells how God took a hand in human communication and caused a single language to split into many (O'Collins, 2006). A similar story in Islam has Allah teaching Adam the names of all things—the first vocabulary lesson in the first language—thus giving language a special status as a divine gift (O'Collins, 2006). Both stories are rich in historical and cultural significance. Yet they provide no empirical evidence from which to draw a picture of how or why languages came into being.
The theory of natural sound sources offers a scientific perspective. It suggests that man's earliest vocalisation began with imitations of the natural sounds around him (Burling, 2005). This theory is based on the obviously ritualistic mimicry of the sounds made by animals and other humans. It extends back to the kinds of mimicry and ritual that may have existed before any kind of real sound-making that could be classified as verbal. But what this theory doesn't explain is how, from our earthly paradise of making sounds and imitating animal and other human sounds, we got to a vocabulary that resembles modern human languages.
A different notion—the social interaction theory—provides another explanation for how language came about and proposes that it emerged from a need for cooperation inherent in group work (Dunbar, 1996). This idea has us consider what early humans might have done when they worked together on projects like hunting or constructing shelters. The sounds they made and the signals they used, not to mention the almost infinitely varied combinations and reconstructions of those signals, might have served the purpose of keeping their projects on course and providing the kinds of instructions that keep any group working together on a single task, like “quiet,” “danger ahead,” or “stay together” from fraying the thread of cooperation.
The scientific discourse often drifts into the cognitive and biological domains. Noam Chomsky has long been a proponent of the idea that all human beings share a universal grammar (Chomsky, 1965). He would argue that the reason for this is that all human brains are hardwired—biologically predetermined, if you will—to use language (Chomsky, 2000). And not only to use it but also to learn it with apparent ease, despite the fact that a given human child will learn a language (or several) in a given environment while the adults in that environment seem to be doing a pretty miserable job of it. After all, they're using a grammar that is far from "grammatically correct" (in tree languages, for instance) or even semantically normal (in phonemic languages, for instance).
The development of language can be traced alongside many other human advancements—such as the creation of tools and art—that date back to our earliest ancestors, like Homo sapiens (Lieberman, 2006; Tattersall, 2014). The use of language is thought to have become complex about 100,000 years ago, overlapping with a time when our ancestors took their first big steps toward the kinds of social and creative lives that make modern humans distinct.
The origins of language may remain forever shrouded in mystery, but the profound impact of that mysterious development upon humanity is beyond question. It is certainly not too much to say that forming language—that is to say, using symbols and sounds with the sort of sophisticated directness and richness of content found in our conversations and literature—is how we became human (Mithen, 2006; Fitch, 2010).
- Reece Benson
Sharing insights on language learning and teaching.
Comments