Perhaps no other component of human culture, apart from tool use, is as important as language. To be able to communicate complex information is crucial in coordinating all kinds of group activity, from hunting to building a spacecraft. Language is also the principal medium for transmitting other aspects of culture – ideas, technologies, behaviours – via teaching and learning.
Until the birth of writing (see here ), language was restricted to speech and signs. Speech of any complexity involves a wide range of different sounds that call for a complex vocal apparatus. Modern humans and Neanderthals seem to have possessed this from the beginning, but fossil evidence suggests that our common ancestors did not.
We do not know how language first arose. Some have suggested that it may have emerged as a more effective way of forging social bonds than the mutual grooming found in other primates. The origins of words may have been imitative, as when a child refers to cows as ‘moo-moos’. The word for ‘mother’ in most languages is similar to ‘mama’; the lip movements involved mimic those of a baby seeking its mother’s nipple. Group activities would call for conventional noises to indicate what needed to be done – the equivalents of such expressions as ‘Hush!’ or ‘Heave-ho’, for example.
‘I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification, aided by signs and gestures, of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man’s own instinctive cries.’
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871)
In the 1960s the linguist Noam Chomsky noted how readily young children acquire their mother tongue and suggested that humans have a ‘language instinct’. The structural principles of the grammar of any language, he proposed, are universal and hardwired into our genes.
We certainly have the hardware: not only a flexible vocal apparatus, but also a brain equipped for memory and associative learning. But are we, as Chomsky suggests, born with built-in software? The answer appears to be no. ‘Feral’ children – those reared by animals, or in complete isolation – fail to pick up language. This suggests that children need to have heard a lot of language before they can speak it. And if there really is an innate universal grammar underlying all languages, detailed analysis of our thousands of different languages has failed to detect it. There are all kinds of ways different languages work. Some use a mere eleven different sounds, others up to 144. Rules governing word order vary widely. Some languages dispense with order altogether, instead creating compound words to indicate (for example) who is doing what to whom.
But the multiplicity of languages, and their relations to each other, can tell us much about how modern humans spread around the world. For example, studies of some Siberian and some North American languages point to a common ancestor. Languages form family trees, and these may often mirror genetic family trees – even though language is culturally transmitted. The range of linguistic differences, together with the fact that some languages – such as Basque – bear no resemblance to any other known language, suggests that language may have emerged independently in a number of different places.