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Origin of language
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries. Scholars wishing to study the origins of language draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, and contemporary language diversity. They may also study language acquisition as well as comparisons between human language and systems of animal communication (particularly other primates). Many argue for the close relation between the origins of language and the origins of modern human behavior, but there is little agreement about the facts and implications of this connection.
The shortage of direct, empirical evidence has caused many scholars to regard the entire topic as unsuitable for serious study; in 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris banned any existing or future debates on the subject, a prohibition which remained influential across much of the Western world until the late twentieth century. Various hypotheses have been developed on the emergence of language. While Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection had provoked a surge of speculation on the origin of language over a century and a half ago, the speculations had not resulted in a scientific consensus by 1996. Despite this, academic interest had returned to the topic by the early 1990s. Linguists, archaeologists, psychologists, and anthropologists have renewed the investigation into the origin of language with modern methods.
Attempts to explain the origin of language take a variety of forms:
Most linguistic scholars as of 2024[update] favor continuity-based theories, but they vary in how they hypothesize language development.[citation needed] Some among those who consider language as mostly innate avoid speculating about specific precursors in non-human primates, stressing simply that the language faculty must have evolved gradually.
Those who consider language as learned socially, such as Michael Tomasello, consider it developing from the cognitively controlled aspects of primate communication, mostly gestural rather than vocal. Where vocal precursors are concerned, many continuity theorists envisage language as evolving from early human capacities for song.
Noam Chomsky, a proponent of discontinuity theory, argues that a single change occurred in humans before leaving Africa, coincident with the Great Leap approximately 100,000 years ago, in which a common language faculty developed in a group of humans and their descendants. Chomsky bases his argument on the observation that any human baby of any culture can be raised in a different culture and will completely assimilate the language and behaviour of the new culture in which they were raised. This implies that no major change to the human language faculty has occurred since they left Africa.
Transcending the continuity-versus-discontinuity divide, some scholars view the emergence of language as the consequence of some kind of social transformation that, by generating unprecedented levels of public trust, liberated a genetic potential for linguistic creativity that had previously lain dormant. "Ritual/speech coevolution theory" exemplifies this approach. Scholars in this intellectual camp point to the fact that even chimpanzees and bonobos have latent symbolic capacities that they rarely—if ever—use in the wild. Objecting to the sudden mutation idea, these authors argue that even if a chance mutation were to install a language organ in an evolving bipedal primate, it would be adaptively useless under all known primate social conditions. A very specific social structure – one capable of upholding unusually high levels of public accountability and trust – must have evolved before or concurrently with language to make reliance on "cheap signals" (e.g. words, where no actual resources are exchanged ) an evolutionarily stable strategy.
Since the emergence of language lies so far back in human prehistory, the relevant developments have left no direct historical traces, and comparable processes cannot be observed today. Despite this, the emergence of new sign languages in modern times—Nicaraguan Sign Language, for example—may offer insights into the developmental stages and creative processes necessarily involved. Another approach inspects early human fossils, looking for traces of physical adaptation to language use. In some cases, when the DNA of extinct humans can be recovered, the presence or absence of genes considered to be language-relevant—FOXP2, for example—may prove informative. Another approach, this time archaeological, involves invoking symbolic behavior (such as repeated ritual activity) that may leave an archaeological trace—such as mining and modifying ochre pigments for body-painting—while developing theoretical arguments to justify inferences from symbolism in general to language in particular.
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Origin of language
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries. Scholars wishing to study the origins of language draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, and contemporary language diversity. They may also study language acquisition as well as comparisons between human language and systems of animal communication (particularly other primates). Many argue for the close relation between the origins of language and the origins of modern human behavior, but there is little agreement about the facts and implications of this connection.
The shortage of direct, empirical evidence has caused many scholars to regard the entire topic as unsuitable for serious study; in 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris banned any existing or future debates on the subject, a prohibition which remained influential across much of the Western world until the late twentieth century. Various hypotheses have been developed on the emergence of language. While Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection had provoked a surge of speculation on the origin of language over a century and a half ago, the speculations had not resulted in a scientific consensus by 1996. Despite this, academic interest had returned to the topic by the early 1990s. Linguists, archaeologists, psychologists, and anthropologists have renewed the investigation into the origin of language with modern methods.
Attempts to explain the origin of language take a variety of forms:
Most linguistic scholars as of 2024[update] favor continuity-based theories, but they vary in how they hypothesize language development.[citation needed] Some among those who consider language as mostly innate avoid speculating about specific precursors in non-human primates, stressing simply that the language faculty must have evolved gradually.
Those who consider language as learned socially, such as Michael Tomasello, consider it developing from the cognitively controlled aspects of primate communication, mostly gestural rather than vocal. Where vocal precursors are concerned, many continuity theorists envisage language as evolving from early human capacities for song.
Noam Chomsky, a proponent of discontinuity theory, argues that a single change occurred in humans before leaving Africa, coincident with the Great Leap approximately 100,000 years ago, in which a common language faculty developed in a group of humans and their descendants. Chomsky bases his argument on the observation that any human baby of any culture can be raised in a different culture and will completely assimilate the language and behaviour of the new culture in which they were raised. This implies that no major change to the human language faculty has occurred since they left Africa.
Transcending the continuity-versus-discontinuity divide, some scholars view the emergence of language as the consequence of some kind of social transformation that, by generating unprecedented levels of public trust, liberated a genetic potential for linguistic creativity that had previously lain dormant. "Ritual/speech coevolution theory" exemplifies this approach. Scholars in this intellectual camp point to the fact that even chimpanzees and bonobos have latent symbolic capacities that they rarely—if ever—use in the wild. Objecting to the sudden mutation idea, these authors argue that even if a chance mutation were to install a language organ in an evolving bipedal primate, it would be adaptively useless under all known primate social conditions. A very specific social structure – one capable of upholding unusually high levels of public accountability and trust – must have evolved before or concurrently with language to make reliance on "cheap signals" (e.g. words, where no actual resources are exchanged ) an evolutionarily stable strategy.
Since the emergence of language lies so far back in human prehistory, the relevant developments have left no direct historical traces, and comparable processes cannot be observed today. Despite this, the emergence of new sign languages in modern times—Nicaraguan Sign Language, for example—may offer insights into the developmental stages and creative processes necessarily involved. Another approach inspects early human fossils, looking for traces of physical adaptation to language use. In some cases, when the DNA of extinct humans can be recovered, the presence or absence of genes considered to be language-relevant—FOXP2, for example—may prove informative. Another approach, this time archaeological, involves invoking symbolic behavior (such as repeated ritual activity) that may leave an archaeological trace—such as mining and modifying ochre pigments for body-painting—while developing theoretical arguments to justify inferences from symbolism in general to language in particular.