Much of the work by linguists regarding the origins of language has focused on the origins of a particular language, such as English, or on the origins of a language family, such as Indo-European. Research on English would include such works as John McWhorter’s (2008) Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, Bill Bryson’s (1990) The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way, Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil’s (1986) The Story of English, and Joseph Williams’ (1975) Origins of the English Language: A Social and Linguistic History. Studies on the Indo-European language family such as David Anthony’s (2006) The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World combine linguistics, genetics, and archaeology to look at the origins of this language family. These studies can provide us with important insights regarding language change, including the impact of other languages and the mechanisms for changes.
The reconstructed form of Proto-Indio-European (commonly abbreviated as PIE) provides some clues about its origins. J. P. Mallory and Victor Mair, in their book The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West, report:
“This reconstructed Proto-Indo-European indicates that its speakers lived in an area were at least some trees were known (alder, birch, elm, fir, hawthorn, maple, pine, yew and probably others such as oak). The wild mammals would have included hare, squirrel, beaver, mouse, fox, wolf, bear, otter, deer, boar and aurochs (wild cattle). Birds included crane, goose, eagle, duck and thrush, while there was a word for fish and trout. The early Indo-Europeans were clearly farmers and stockkeepers: they had a number of terms for cattle, sheep, goat, pig and dog, and the word for horse is generally taken to indicate the domesticated horse.”
These clues from the language have allowed archaeologists such as David Anthony to connect archaeological findings with language and thus trace the migration of the PIE-speakers from their homelands north of the Black Sea into Europe and Asia.
Much of the work in tracing the origins of the Indo-European language family has utilized a model which views language histories as a kind of family tree in which from one language—such as proto-Indo-European—have come many languages. In The Rise and Fall of Languages, R.M.W. Dixon writes:
“The family tree model was developed for—and is eminently appropriate to—the Indo-European (IE) language family. It has become the received view of how languages are related, so that linguists attempt to discover an IE-like family tree structure in every group of languages, from anywhere in the world (whatever their typological profile); along with this goes an attempt at detailed sub-grouping.”
In other words, as linguists have attempted to use this model for understanding the historical development of other language families it has not worked as well. Some languages, for example, are classified as isolating which means that each meaning element makes up a distinct word. R.M.W. Dixon writes:
“If a group of modern languages are all basically isolating, with few grammatical affixes, it may never be possible to prove genetic connection with the same degree of confidence as for an agglutinative group.”
In agglutinative languages a word may contain several meaning elements—prefixes, suffixes, and infixes—which change the meaning of the word. Agglutinative languages, such as Japanese, tend to have very few irregular verbs.
In tracing the origins and history of a language, it is not uncommon for linguists to use data and insights from archaeology and genetics as an aid in understanding the process. With regard to the history of English, for example, it was long thought that the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invaded Britain, driving out and/or replacing the earlier Celtic-speaking people. DNA, however, tells a different story. John McWhorter, in his book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, writes:
“It turns out that only about 4 percent of British men’s genetic material is traceable to a migration from across the North Sea. Moreover, essentially none of the British women’s genetic material traces back to such a migration, meaning that the invaders were not couples with children, such that women and young’uns would bulk up the total. Rather, the invaders were just a bunch of guys.”
What this means is, that was a time when many of the fathers spoke one language while the mothers spoke another and therefore they communicated to each other in a pidgin. Their children, in turn, developed the pidgin into a creole which would later become English. John McWhorter writes:
“English is not, then, solely an offshoot of Proto-Germanic that inhaled a whole bunch of foreign words. It is an offshoot of Proto-Germanic that traded grammar with offshoots of Proto-Celtic. The result was a structurally hybrid tongue, whose speakers today use Celtic-derived constructions almost every time they open their mouths for longer than a couple of seconds.”
When it comes to the origins of language in general, there are relatively few academic and scientific studies. Archaeologists have not yet uncovered a fossil word. Our understandings of the origins and development of language in Homo sapiens is derived from indirect sources, including the comparative study of today’s languages. Over the past two centuries, linguists—academic, professional, avocational—have put forth many interesting (and sometimes absurd) hypotheses about the origins of language and they have engaged in many heated debates on the subject.
In 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris barred from its meetings any papers dealing with the origins of language. Linguist M.E. Landsberg, in an entry on the origins of language in The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, writes:
“The topic ‘language origins’ is still so delicate and controversial that few scholars dare or wish to tackle it. Had but one proper fossilized word been found, matters would, of course, be quite different.”
There are a number of people who arrogantly assume that their ethnocentric religious views explain the matter and, therefore, there is no reason for research, discussion, or debate. Linguist Bernard Bichakjian, in his chapter on language origins in
Studies in Language Origins, writes:
“Those who subscribe to the Biblical explanation have it all sorted out: humans speak because they have been made in the image of God, and they speak different languages because their Divine Father punished them for not ‘keeping their distance.’”
The basic starting point for a rational and realistic discussion of language origins should be the data: what data do we need for the formation of an actual hypothesis? One of the starting points used by many researchers is the fact that the human capacity for language is biologically based and integrates anatomical, neural, and behavioral elements. In their paper laying down the empirical foundations for a theory of language change, Uriel Weinreich, William Labov, and Marvin Herzog, in their article in
Directions for Historical Linguistics: A Symposium, write:
“We think of a theory of language change as part of a larger theoretical inquiry into linguistic evolution as a whole. A theory of linguistic evolution would have to show how forms of communication characteristic of other biological genera evolved (with whatever mutations) into a proto-language distinctly human, and then into languages with the structures and complexity of the speech forms we observe today. It would have to indicate how present-day languages evolved from the earliest attested (or inferred) forms for which we have evidence; and finally it would determine if the present course of linguistic evolution is following the same direction, and is governed by the same factors, as those which have operated in the past.”
They also point out that:
“Linguistic and social factors are closely interrelated in the development of language change. Explanations which are confined to one or the other aspect, no matter how well constructed, will fail to account for the rich body of regularities that can be observed in empirical studies of language behavior.”
They seem to suggest that the search for the origins of language must include an understanding of evolution and of aspects of human behavior other than just language.
In Origins of the English Language: A Social and Linguistic History, linguist Joseph Williams writes:
“Assuming we can reject the idea that language was the gift of the gods, we have to ask how it was possible for a hominid that presumably communicated not too much differently from our present primate relatives to evolve into a creature who can do what you and I are now doing.”
Williams suggests that we can break the problem of language origins into three basic parts:
Biological differences: This includes both neurological and anatomical speech features between homo sapiens and other primates. Some of these biological differences should be found in the fossil record.
“Design features”: This looks at the differences between human languages and animal communication systems. One of the questions here is: Did language evolve from animal communication systems?
Evolution: Evolution forms the foundation of scientific inquiry into biology. How and why did the biological/neurological and design features evolve? With regard to natural selection, what reproductive advantages did these features provide?