New Ideas About the Origin of Language

The University of Rochester has done a study on the origin of language in humans. They wanted to find out if a part of the human brain “gives humans advanced language capabilities over other animals.” To do the study, they were going to “determine if different brain regions were used to decipher sentences with different types of grammar.” The order of words is vital to the English language, while in Spanish, inflection and suffixes are necessary to give a sentence a certain meaning. Sign language uses both of these systems, so researchers studied sign language and found that the separate areas of the brain processed the two forms of sentences.

Researchers have found that there are only miniscule differences between the neurology of humans and animals. The significant difference is the size of our brain, which is bigger and allows for more advanced communication. The brain more than tripled in size about 200,000 years ago, and language developed at the same time. Researchers believe the brain may have increased in size so that language could develop.

The article then cites a book called The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley that claims that trade among different groups of people who speak different languages required the brain to evolve to understand different sentence structures. If this is true, the brain’s capacity to understand languages is much more modern than once believed.

Full article here.

Another article called the “History of Language” claims that communication is universal to all social animals, but one part of the brain, the cortical speech centre, is unique to humans. This section “organizes sound and meaning on a rational basis.” It is impossible to know when exactly language developed, but it was most definitely an extended process. Now, there are about five thousand spoken languages, but they all belong to about twenty groups. Each group is believed to have been derived from a common ancestor. Some experts believe that the original language developed as recently as a few thousand years ago. The article discusses language as an evolutionary process that is not so different from human evolution. The more useful a language is, the more it will spread. This evolution is ongoing even today.

The study of the origin of language is still incomplete, but researchers form new, interesting hypotheses constantly. Each new finding sheds light on the history of people and their interactions with each other. The findings also bring up many more questions and debates. The debates are still relevant to the present day because language is constantly evolving. Without always realizing it, we are in the midst of an evolutionary change. Language changes from century to century but also from generation to generation. Even writing as recent as Shakespeare’s in the 17^th century seems like a whole different language than the English we know today. What will our languages sound like in 50, 100, 300, 500 years? How are we contributing to these changes? Will the evolution of language ever stop? Which languages will survive the evolutionary trends?