Language

• 1. Introduction

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  Language lets a child of roughly three years old speak fluently, yet no animal trained for years has matched what an average four-year-old can do. A bonobo named Kanzi learned to express itself using symbolic lexigrams. Birds and whales learn their songs by imitating others of their species. None of them acquired the complex grammar that every healthy human child absorbs without formal instruction. Language is a structured system of communication built from grammar and vocabulary, and it is the primary way humans convey meaning. How many languages exist depends on where you draw an arbitrary line between a language and a dialect. What follows asks where this faculty came from, how the brain runs it, how sounds and signs build meaning, and why between half and ninety percent of today's languages may vanish by the year 2100.

• 2. Origins And Evolution

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  Stephen Anderson estimates the age of spoken languages at 60,000 to 100,000 years. Researchers generally find it plausible that language was invented only once, so that all modern spoken languages are in some way related, even if that relation can no longer be recovered. Because language emerged before any written records, its early development left no historical traces. Continuity-based theories, held by a majority of scholars, treat language as something that evolved from earlier pre-linguistic systems among pre-human ancestors. Psychologist Steven Pinker locates the precedents in animal cognition. Psychologist Michael Tomasello sees language as developing from gestural or vocal communication among primates to assist cooperation. Other models trace language back to music, a view already espoused by Rousseau, Herder, Humboldt, and Charles Darwin, with archaeologist Steven Mithen as a prominent proponent. Discontinuity theories take the opposite stance, arguing language appeared suddenly in the transition from pre-hominids to early man. Noam Chomsky is one prominent proponent. He proposes that perhaps some random mutation reorganized the brain, implanting a language organ in an otherwise primate brain, and that talk about the evolution of the language capacity is beside the point. Scholarly opinion on timing scatters widely across the genus Homo, which appeared some 2.5 million years ago. Some place proto-language as early as Homo habilis, 2.3 million years ago, others with Homo erectus at 1.8 million years ago, or Homo heidelbergensis at 0.6 million years ago. In March 2024, researchers reported that the beginnings of human language began about 1.6 million years ago.

• 3. What Sets Humans Apart

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  Charles Hockett described a set of traits he called design features that separate human language from animal communication. Communication systems used by bees or apes are closed, consisting of a finite and usually very limited number of possible ideas. Human language is open-ended and productive, built on a dual code in which a finite set of meaningless elements like sounds or gestures combine into an infinite number of meaningful units. Recursivity is one distinguishing property. A noun phrase can contain another noun phrase, as in the chimpanzee's lips, and a clause can contain another clause. Displacement is another. Human language can refer to abstract concepts and to imagined or hypothetical events, as well as to the past and the future. Bees can communicate the location of nectar that is out of sight, but the degree of displacement in human language is considered unique. Modality independence sets it apart further. Spoken language uses the auditive channel, sign languages and writing use the visual, and braille uses the tactile. A few animal cases blur the edges. An Australian bird, the chestnut-crowned babbler, can use the same acoustic elements in different arrangements to create two functionally distinct vocalizations. Pied babblers produce two distinct calls made of the same sound type, distinguished only by the number of repeated elements. Still, none of these systems approaches the grammatical and semantic categories, such as noun and verb or present and past, that let human language express exceedingly complex meanings.

• 4. The Brain And The Voice

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  FOXP2 is the only gene that has definitely been implicated in language production. Mutations affecting it may cause a kind of congenital language disorder. The brain coordinates all linguistic activity, yet knowledge of its neurological basis remains limited even as imaging techniques advance. Nineteenth-century neuroscientists studying people with brain lesions found two areas crucial to language. Wernicke's area sits in the posterior section of the superior temporal gyrus in the dominant cerebral hemisphere. A lesion there produces receptive aphasia, a major impairment of comprehension, while speech keeps a natural-sounding rhythm and relatively normal sentence structure. Broca's area lies in the posterior inferior frontal gyrus of the dominant hemisphere. A lesion there produces expressive aphasia, where a person knows what they want to say but cannot get it out, often with ungrammatical speech and problems repeating words. Both aphasias affect sign language in analogous ways, which shows the impairment is specific to language, not to the physiology of speech. Producing spoken language depends on the lungs, the voice box or larynx, and the upper vocal tract of throat, mouth, and nose. Vowels carry no audible friction and vary by lip aperture and tongue placement, while consonants involve friction or closure at some point in the vocal tract. Voicing is what separates the unvoiced s in bus from the voiced z in buzz. With these organs humans produce hundreds of distinct sounds, some near-universal and others specific to a single language.

• 5. Sounds Into Meaning

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  Phonemes are the smallest units in a language that can distinguish the meaning of a minimal pair. In English, bat and pat form such a pair, where the contrast between b and p changes the word. Each language draws these lines differently. English treats the unaspirated p in spin and the aspirated p in pin as the same phoneme, mere allophones, but in Mandarin Chinese that same difference distinguishes pa meaning crouch from pa meaning eight, set apart by tone. The number of phonemes varies enormously. Rotokas has 11 and Pirahã has 10, while Taa may have as many as 141. In sign languages, the equivalent units, formerly called cheremes, are defined by hand shape, orientation, location, and motion. Meaning attaches to signs by social convention, which makes the linguistic sign arbitrary. The English sign dog denotes a member of the species Canis familiaris with no natural connection between the sound and the animal. The array of arbitrary signs tied to meanings is called the lexicon, and a single such sign is a lexeme. Writing represents language with visual symbols. The Latin alphabet was originally based on single sounds, the Inuktitut syllabary gives each sign a whole syllable, and logographic scripts give each sign an entire word. Because all languages have very large vocabularies, no purely logographic script is known to exist. The direction of writing is arbitrary, from left to right in Latin script, right to left in Arabic, and top to bottom in traditional Chinese. The ancient Maya script could run in either direction, using graphic cues to show the reader which way to read.

• 6. How Words Are Built

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  Morphemes are the meaningful elements that grammar combines into utterances, and they can be free or bound. The English word unexpected breaks into three morphemes, un, expect, and ed. Languages differ enormously in how much they lean on morphology. Chinese has essentially no morphological processes and encodes grammar by stringing single words together, a pattern called isolating or analytic. Fusional languages pack several meanings into one morpheme. In Latin, bonus consists of the root bon meaning good and the suffix us, which indicates masculine gender, singular number, and nominative case at once. Agglutinative languages instead chain discrete morphemes. In Turkish, evlerinizden, from your houses, runs as house-plural-your-from. Polysynthetic languages push furthest, expressing a whole English sentence in one word. In the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksatengqiggtuq, meaning he had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer, only the morpheme tuntu for reindeer can appear in isolation. Word order carries meaning too. In English, the slaves were cursing the master differs from the master was cursing the slaves because subject precedes the verb and object follows it. Latin instead uses case endings, so Dominus servos vituperabat and Servos vituperabat dominus both mean the master was reprimanding the slaves, with servos in the accusative marking it as object. Languages also vary in basic word order. English is SVO, the snake bit the man, while the Australian language Gamilaraay is SOV. Gamilaraay is also ergative, treating the lone participant of an intransitive sentence the same as the patient of a transitive one.

• 7. Language As A Social Tool

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  Charles Darwin, in The Descent of Man, called first-language acquisition an instinctive tendency to acquire an art. It requires no direct teaching. Studies published in 2013 indicated that unborn fetuses are capable of language acquisition to some degree. Newborns respond more readily to human speech than to other sounds. Around one month, babies appear able to distinguish different speech sounds, and around six months a child begins babbling, producing the sounds or handshapes of the languages around them. Words appear around 12 to 18 months, and the average vocabulary of an eighteen-month-old is around 50 words. From roughly three to five years, the child's speech or sign comes to resemble adult language. Beyond communication, language signals identity and social position. Linguists use the term varieties for different ways of speaking, including dialects and the jargons of subcultures. Many languages encode social hierarchy directly. In the Australian language Dyirbal, a married man must use a special set of words for everyday items when his mother-in-law is present. In east Asian languages such as Thai, Burmese, and Javanese, different words apply depending on whether one addresses someone of higher or lower rank, in a system that ranks animals and children lowest and gods and royalty highest. The two modes of language, oral and manual, often work together. In Iwaidja, the idea of going out for fish with a torch is spoken simply as he-hunted fish torch, with a gesture on torch showing it was held. The ritual language Damin had only a few hundred very general words, supplemented by gesture for precision, so the single word for fish was paired with a gesture naming the kind. Because contact between communities keeps reshaping languages, many small ones become endangered as their speakers shift toward larger, more influential speech communities.

• 8. Studying Language

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  Pāṇini, the 5th century BC grammarian, formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology, a formal study of language often considered the field's starting point. Yet Sumerian scribes already studied the differences between Sumerian and Akkadian grammar around 1900 BC. In the 17th century, the French Port-Royal Grammarians argued that the grammars of all languages reflected the universal basics of thought. In the 18th century, the British philologist and expert on ancient India William Jones used the comparative method, sparking the rise of comparative linguistics. Wilhelm von Humboldt broadened the scientific study of language from Indo-European to language in general. Early in the 20th century, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure introduced language as a static system of interconnected units defined by their oppositions. He separated diachronic from synchronic analysis and distinguished langue, the abstract system, from parole, its concrete manifestation, laying the foundation of the modern discipline. In the 1960s, Noam Chomsky formulated the generative theory, holding that a set of syntactic rules called Universal Grammar underlies the grammars of all human languages. Functional theories oppose this, arguing that because language is fundamentally a tool, its structures are best understood by reference to their functions. Debates about words, concepts, and reality reach back to Gorgias and Plato in ancient Greece. Gorgias argued that language could represent neither objective nor human experience, making truth impossible. Plato held that communication works because language represents ideas that exist prior to it. Those questions, about meaning, reference, and consciousness, remain active today.