The Birth of Modern Languages

By Rachel Hughes               Tweet

In an article by Nicholas Wade in the New York Times, the roots of modern language have been reviled. Biologist Quentin D. Atkinson has applied mathematical equations to linguistics to estimate evolution of language based on the number of phonemes in the language.

A phoneme is the simplest element of any language; think vowels, consonants, and tones. Through looking at the phonemes in a language Dr. Atkinson has found that the further from the likely origin-of-language a language developed, the fewer phonemes it has. English has 45 phonemes, whereas some languages in Africa have over 100. Because of the large numbers of phonemes in African languages around the southwest coast of Africa, and the dwindling numbers of phonemes as languages radiate outwards from there, the estimated birth place of modern language is around this coast. The key to understanding the way languages relate, says Dr. Atkinson’s advisor Mark Pagel, is to understand that though a language develops its own structure it also “retains a signal of its ancestry over tens of thousands of years.”

There is an estimated 6,700 languages in the world, most of which are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people. Four official languages of the United Nations –English, French, Russian, and Spanish—can all be found in the Proto-Indo-European Language family. Chinese is part of the Sino-Tibetan family, and Arabic the Proto-Semitic (or Afro-Asiatic) family. Trying to understand how these languages fit into history, and how they related to each other, has been the goal of Evolutionary Linguists since the 1800s. Language trees have been the result of these efforts, and I must say they are pretty interesting. Note the three language trees of the United Nations official languages if you find yourself looking to study a new language and wish to find something similar to your native tongue, or something only related by the origin from the newly famous Southwestern African coast.

After trying to figure out what I want to do with my life for the past three years of college at UIowa, I’ve finally decided to go back to square one. I like writing, I like languages, and I like knowing about other people, and that is about the extent to which I understand myself. Eventually I would like to be fluent in 5 languages–English, Indonesian, German, Spanish, and Gaelic–and then work as a linguist for the United Nations.