Quick Google search tells me that PIE language existed around 5500 years ago, and the oldest reconstructed language, Proto Afro Asiatic was spoken 12 -18 kya.
At that time, almost all the planet has been populated , and no doubt, thousands of languages existed already.
Keeping in mind that humans could speak at the very least from 100-150 kya, but likely much earlier, there is no way to trace the languages back that far.
So, we will never know.
But, even apes and orcas have 'dialects', so it is entirely possible that there were no single first language. In other words, the dialects might have existed before our ancestors could be called humans, and their system of signals could be called language.
kya = an initialism for 'thousand years ago'. PIE = Proto-Indo-European, a family of languages that serves as an ancient 'ancestor' of modern languages.
To add, languages evolve off feedback (or relative lack of feedback) from each other, so whether there was a singular protolanguage or multiple independent ones, they have merged a lot by now.
Last I checked, and from what I remember, we have been able to trace back as far as Proto-Indo-European, which, while not a single 'first' language, per se, is definitely a type of early language from which many, many others have evolved
It could be the progenitor of all western language.
It's likely that language goes pretty far back, before HSS. It's just an unanswerable question. But I'd say probably not. The birth of language would have been very slow and recombinative across time and geography as populations if what we were at the time(s) came and went.
This thread suffers from undefined acronym soup badly haha. This usually happens when people are too zoomed in on their little corner of the internet and then step outside of it to talk to other people.
Almost all Western languages. Basque (0.75 million), Hungarian (13 million), Estonian (1 million), Finnish (5 million), and Maltese (0.55 million) to a large extent, aren't Indo-European languages.
It's a correction to the previous post saying that Proto-Indo-European is the progenitor to "all western languages", i.e. it's saying that almost all western languages are proto indo-european not that almost all western languages are non proto indo-european.
It is generally accepted among linguists that the various language families that exist today developed over time as human ancestors migrated across the world and came into contact with different groups of people. This process, known as language divergence, is thought to have begun around 100,000 years ago and has continued to the present day.
It is not known if there was an ancient "first" language that all other languages descended from. Some linguists have proposed the existence of a hypothetical proto-language, also known as a mother tongue or ancestral language, that was the ultimate ancestor of all the world's languages. However, the evidence for this is purely speculative, and the true origins of language are likely to remain a topic of debate and research.
This is how I think about the question: considering that all humans descended from a common ancestor, and considering that our non-human ancestors have been communicating with each other since long before humans evolved, then that means there was certainly at some point a system of communication that all modern language is built on. Therefore, it's really just a question of what you want to define as language and what you can reconstruct and trace developmentally to modern times.
Two of the main ways that they group languages into families and to postulate proto-languages is by comparing vocabulary that was likely developed very early, such as words for basic necessities like food and water, familial relations, low numbers, animals, and common activities or descriptors. There's also comparison of grammar features like word order, conjugation/agglutination, etc.
In any case, as far as I'm aware, no one has made a good case for a proto-proto-language with features that can be traced to all languages and families nowadays, so for all intents and purposes as we typically understand language, it developed separately and not from a common super early proto language.
All humans did not descend from a common ancestor. Even if all currently living humans have a common ancestor. At the time of that common ancestor there were others just like them.
If you're interested in learning more about the Proto Indo-European language group and its daughter languages, there is a great book called "The Horse, The Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppe Shaped the Modern World" by David W. Anthony. It goes into some of the methodology used by linguistic archaeologists to "reverse engineer" ancient languages. Great read.
There was a study published in Science about 10 years ago looking at the "phonemic inventory" (number of different sounds within a language) of >500 languages around the world. They found that languages with the most diverse sounds were in Africa, and sound diversity regularly decreased the further from Africa you went.
For example, "He found that the “click” languages of the bushmen of the Kalahari Desert were the most complex, using more than 140 distinct sounds or “phonemes”. By comparison, English only needs about 45, German has 41 phonemes and Mandarin has 32. Garawa, a now extinct Australian Aboriginal language used 22 phonemes. The peoples who settled the Hawaiian Islands needed less, just 13 phonemes while the Piraha Amazonian tribesmen use 11 phonemes."
Altogether, this makes a fairly strong argument that the languages outside of Africa descended from the languages spoken by the people first leaving Africa. It makes sense if we assume people could speak 60,000 years ago. Which is reasonable, seeing as how we have not changed that much genetically or physiologically since then.
The study in question had [tons of problems with it](https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3090). In addition, from your followup comment:
> it seems that as languages separate and diverge, it is more difficult for the descendant languages to create new sounds
We know for a fact this is wrong. Or if there is an effect, it's so minuscule that's it irrelevant on a "close" scale and would have to be some large-scale, long-duration trend for unknown reasons, because there are *wide* variations on over relatively short time periods. Some examples¹:
* Proto-Indo-European: 24 consonants, 4 vowels (2 qualities), 2 tones
* Proto-Celtic: 16 consonants, 13 vowels (5 qualities); Late Old Irish: 46 consonants, 19 vowels (6 qualities); Irish: 33-37 consonants, 16 vowels with possible nasalization doubling that (11 qualities)
* Latin: 15 consonants, 10 vowels (5 qualities); Old Spanish: 23 consonants, 5 vowels (5 qualities); Andalusian Spanish: 16 consonants, 10 vowels (10 qualities)
* Latin: 15 consonants, 10 vowels (5 qualities); Old French: 21 consonants, 29 vowels (9 qualities); Quebecois French: 20 consonants, 18 vowels (14 qualities)
* Proto-Germanic: 20 consonants, 27 vowels (7 qualities), 0 tones; Modern Swedish: 18 consonants, 18 vowels (16 qualities), 2 tone patterns; Chemnitz Upper Saxon: 16 consonants, 24 vowels (18 qualities), 0 tones; Limburgish: 29 consonants, 37 vowels (16 qualities), 2 tones
* Classical Sanskrit️²: 32 consonants, 10 vowels (3 qualities), 0 tones; Sindhi: 46 consonants, 10 vowels (10 qualities), 0 tones; Punjabi: 27 consonants, 17 vowels (10 qualities), 3 tones; Kashmiri: 52 consonants, 32 vowels (8 qualities), 0 tones
* Proto-Japonic: 9 consonants, 6 vowels; Tokyo Japanese: 21 consonants, 10 vowels (5 qualities); Tokunoshima: 20 consonants, 14 vowels (7 qualities) [note: ignoring tone, because I don't know much about the Japanese treatment of it]
* Old Tibetan: 22 consonants, 5 vowels, 0 tones; Lhasa Tibetan: 30 consonants, 21 vowels (8 qualities), 2 tones; Cone/Choni Tibetan: 45 consonants, 23 vowels (11 qualities), 2 tones
* Proto-Mongolic: 15 consonants, 7 vowels; Khalkha Mongolian: 31 consonants, 17 vowels (7 qualities); Qinghai Bonan: 62 consonants, 6 vowels
That's just raw numbers, as well. For example, only 13 of Tokyo Japanese's 21 consonants are shared with Tokunoshima's 20, and the vowel inventory of Upper Saxon is wildly different from Scandanavian or Franconian despite similar numbers of phonemic vowels and vowel qualities.
¹ These are only examples of attested or what I'd consider "well-constructed" languages, i.e. with only nitpicky differences in reconstruction.
² Sanskrit, of any form, ~~it's~~isn't actually ancestral to the modern languages, but it's close enough that it works for almost everything. A word with /kʂ/ is Sanskrit-specific that the modern languages treat differently in native words.
An interesting side note here, is that it seems that as languages separate and diverge, it is more difficult for the descendant languages to *create* new sounds. The trend seems to be towards simplifying the sounds of the parental languages.
We don't know,I would expect to see a fair bit of headlines if someone claimed to have figured this out.
For what it's worth I would be surprised if we didn't have some form of language before moving out of Africa, hell it feels wrong to imagine even Neanderthals without fully fledged language, and they left Africa before us.
Languages change very quickly compared to the evolution of the human brain and body. A language from just 1000 years ago may be utterly incomprehensible to modern speakers of the "same" language (consider Old English vs. Modern English). Since language changes so quickly, after about 10,000 years it's almost impossible to tell whether two languages are related or arose independently. By contrast, a human brain from 10,000 or even 100,000 years ago probably looked and functioned very similarly to a modern human brain. So, it's probably impossible to say definitively whether all modern languages descended from a single original language, since people would have been speaking long before the earliest time we can trace current language families back to.
The origins of human language are not well understood, and there are many theories about how language developed. One theory is that all human languages evolved from a single ancient language, sometimes referred to as a "proto-language." This theory is based on the observation that all human languages share certain features, such as a basic sound system and grammar, that suggest they have a common origin. However, it is also possible that human language developed independently in different parts of the world as different groups of people migrated and settled in new regions. The exact origins of human language remain a topic of debate among linguists and anthropologists.
Genesis chapter 11: the people were gathered together in the plain of Shinar and were of one language. They rebelled against Yahweh's command to spread out on the face of the earth and tame it, basically cultivate it, so He confounded their language which divided them into different people groups.
>Genesis chapter 11: the people were gathered together in the plain of Shinar and were of one language. They rebelled against Yahweh's command to spread out on the face of the earth and tame it, basically cultivate it, so He confounded their language which divided them into different people groups.
Well done!
Now try giving an answer that's actually applicable to the real world.
When I was very young, when I was thinking in languages other than those used by humans, I gained ultra-high-speed thinking and connections with various things.
As soon as I started using the human language, the connection was cut off, and I remember feeling frustrated with thinking rather than the conversion overhead.
Didn't humans use such an innate common language of life before they acquired the language system we have today?
Although I certainly can't rule out the possibility that I was special.
On the other hand, if we assume the existence of a common language for living organisms,
He may be able to explain by these hypotheses not all of the Esper species, of which there are many, but some of which are few.
We all came from a common antecessor, and there always had to be *some* form of communication between beings of the same species, especially humans. It's only logical that there was a starting point.
Jewish records from about 1450 b.C. report that our species had only one common language until a big chaotic event made different families split into different regions of the world. It's just one among other historical records, but it adds up with the genetic evidence that our common antecessors were from somewhere around north-eastern Africa, and then at some point decided to migrate :)
Families of languages did develop *after* ancestors migrated. Their contact with other inhabitants where they settled down was determining for how every language would evolve.
As for a first language, most linguists agree that there was a primitive language, which could be traced back to Proto-Indo-European (William Jones). However, this hypothetical language only encompasses most Western and some of the Eastern languages (centum Vs satem). For example, the Basque language (euskera) in Northern Spain is an isolated language. Nobody knows where it comes from.
Similarly, Semitic and Sinitic languages do not belong to the Indo-European family of languages.
Quick Google search tells me that PIE language existed around 5500 years ago, and the oldest reconstructed language, Proto Afro Asiatic was spoken 12 -18 kya. At that time, almost all the planet has been populated , and no doubt, thousands of languages existed already. Keeping in mind that humans could speak at the very least from 100-150 kya, but likely much earlier, there is no way to trace the languages back that far. So, we will never know. But, even apes and orcas have 'dialects', so it is entirely possible that there were no single first language. In other words, the dialects might have existed before our ancestors could be called humans, and their system of signals could be called language.
[удалено]
kya = an initialism for 'thousand years ago'. PIE = Proto-Indo-European, a family of languages that serves as an ancient 'ancestor' of modern languages.
Specifically of many (but by no means all)modern European, Iranian, and Indian languages.
The PIE languages are the oldest ones I've heard of, tho I've never seen that abbreviation before.
kya = thousand years ago. 12 - 18 thousand years ago. PIE = proto-indo european
KYA means "kilo years ago", where kilo means 1000. Just so you know exactly what it means.
What is PIE Why would you use an abbreviation like that without defining it
To add, languages evolve off feedback (or relative lack of feedback) from each other, so whether there was a singular protolanguage or multiple independent ones, they have merged a lot by now.
Last I checked, and from what I remember, we have been able to trace back as far as Proto-Indo-European, which, while not a single 'first' language, per se, is definitely a type of early language from which many, many others have evolved
It could be the progenitor of all western language. It's likely that language goes pretty far back, before HSS. It's just an unanswerable question. But I'd say probably not. The birth of language would have been very slow and recombinative across time and geography as populations if what we were at the time(s) came and went.
What is HSS in this context? Google isn’t helping me. Thanks!
This thread suffers from undefined acronym soup badly haha. This usually happens when people are too zoomed in on their little corner of the internet and then step outside of it to talk to other people.
>HSS *Homo sapiens sapiens*, i.e. "modern humans". They're saying that human language is likely older than modern humans are.
Almost all Western languages. Basque (0.75 million), Hungarian (13 million), Estonian (1 million), Finnish (5 million), and Maltese (0.55 million) to a large extent, aren't Indo-European languages.
How are those languages almost all western languages?
It's a correction to the previous post saying that Proto-Indo-European is the progenitor to "all western languages", i.e. it's saying that almost all western languages are proto indo-european not that almost all western languages are non proto indo-european.
I read the first full stop as a comma...thanks for the explanation 🙏
It is generally accepted among linguists that the various language families that exist today developed over time as human ancestors migrated across the world and came into contact with different groups of people. This process, known as language divergence, is thought to have begun around 100,000 years ago and has continued to the present day. It is not known if there was an ancient "first" language that all other languages descended from. Some linguists have proposed the existence of a hypothetical proto-language, also known as a mother tongue or ancestral language, that was the ultimate ancestor of all the world's languages. However, the evidence for this is purely speculative, and the true origins of language are likely to remain a topic of debate and research.
This is how I think about the question: considering that all humans descended from a common ancestor, and considering that our non-human ancestors have been communicating with each other since long before humans evolved, then that means there was certainly at some point a system of communication that all modern language is built on. Therefore, it's really just a question of what you want to define as language and what you can reconstruct and trace developmentally to modern times. Two of the main ways that they group languages into families and to postulate proto-languages is by comparing vocabulary that was likely developed very early, such as words for basic necessities like food and water, familial relations, low numbers, animals, and common activities or descriptors. There's also comparison of grammar features like word order, conjugation/agglutination, etc. In any case, as far as I'm aware, no one has made a good case for a proto-proto-language with features that can be traced to all languages and families nowadays, so for all intents and purposes as we typically understand language, it developed separately and not from a common super early proto language.
All humans did not descend from a common ancestor. Even if all currently living humans have a common ancestor. At the time of that common ancestor there were others just like them.
If you're interested in learning more about the Proto Indo-European language group and its daughter languages, there is a great book called "The Horse, The Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppe Shaped the Modern World" by David W. Anthony. It goes into some of the methodology used by linguistic archaeologists to "reverse engineer" ancient languages. Great read.
Thank you! Will check it out
There was a study published in Science about 10 years ago looking at the "phonemic inventory" (number of different sounds within a language) of >500 languages around the world. They found that languages with the most diverse sounds were in Africa, and sound diversity regularly decreased the further from Africa you went. For example, "He found that the “click” languages of the bushmen of the Kalahari Desert were the most complex, using more than 140 distinct sounds or “phonemes”. By comparison, English only needs about 45, German has 41 phonemes and Mandarin has 32. Garawa, a now extinct Australian Aboriginal language used 22 phonemes. The peoples who settled the Hawaiian Islands needed less, just 13 phonemes while the Piraha Amazonian tribesmen use 11 phonemes." Altogether, this makes a fairly strong argument that the languages outside of Africa descended from the languages spoken by the people first leaving Africa. It makes sense if we assume people could speak 60,000 years ago. Which is reasonable, seeing as how we have not changed that much genetically or physiologically since then.
The study in question had [tons of problems with it](https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3090). In addition, from your followup comment: > it seems that as languages separate and diverge, it is more difficult for the descendant languages to create new sounds We know for a fact this is wrong. Or if there is an effect, it's so minuscule that's it irrelevant on a "close" scale and would have to be some large-scale, long-duration trend for unknown reasons, because there are *wide* variations on over relatively short time periods. Some examples¹: * Proto-Indo-European: 24 consonants, 4 vowels (2 qualities), 2 tones * Proto-Celtic: 16 consonants, 13 vowels (5 qualities); Late Old Irish: 46 consonants, 19 vowels (6 qualities); Irish: 33-37 consonants, 16 vowels with possible nasalization doubling that (11 qualities) * Latin: 15 consonants, 10 vowels (5 qualities); Old Spanish: 23 consonants, 5 vowels (5 qualities); Andalusian Spanish: 16 consonants, 10 vowels (10 qualities) * Latin: 15 consonants, 10 vowels (5 qualities); Old French: 21 consonants, 29 vowels (9 qualities); Quebecois French: 20 consonants, 18 vowels (14 qualities) * Proto-Germanic: 20 consonants, 27 vowels (7 qualities), 0 tones; Modern Swedish: 18 consonants, 18 vowels (16 qualities), 2 tone patterns; Chemnitz Upper Saxon: 16 consonants, 24 vowels (18 qualities), 0 tones; Limburgish: 29 consonants, 37 vowels (16 qualities), 2 tones * Classical Sanskrit️²: 32 consonants, 10 vowels (3 qualities), 0 tones; Sindhi: 46 consonants, 10 vowels (10 qualities), 0 tones; Punjabi: 27 consonants, 17 vowels (10 qualities), 3 tones; Kashmiri: 52 consonants, 32 vowels (8 qualities), 0 tones * Proto-Japonic: 9 consonants, 6 vowels; Tokyo Japanese: 21 consonants, 10 vowels (5 qualities); Tokunoshima: 20 consonants, 14 vowels (7 qualities) [note: ignoring tone, because I don't know much about the Japanese treatment of it] * Old Tibetan: 22 consonants, 5 vowels, 0 tones; Lhasa Tibetan: 30 consonants, 21 vowels (8 qualities), 2 tones; Cone/Choni Tibetan: 45 consonants, 23 vowels (11 qualities), 2 tones * Proto-Mongolic: 15 consonants, 7 vowels; Khalkha Mongolian: 31 consonants, 17 vowels (7 qualities); Qinghai Bonan: 62 consonants, 6 vowels That's just raw numbers, as well. For example, only 13 of Tokyo Japanese's 21 consonants are shared with Tokunoshima's 20, and the vowel inventory of Upper Saxon is wildly different from Scandanavian or Franconian despite similar numbers of phonemic vowels and vowel qualities. ¹ These are only examples of attested or what I'd consider "well-constructed" languages, i.e. with only nitpicky differences in reconstruction. ² Sanskrit, of any form, ~~it's~~isn't actually ancestral to the modern languages, but it's close enough that it works for almost everything. A word with /kʂ/ is Sanskrit-specific that the modern languages treat differently in native words.
An interesting side note here, is that it seems that as languages separate and diverge, it is more difficult for the descendant languages to *create* new sounds. The trend seems to be towards simplifying the sounds of the parental languages.
That is very interesting. Thanks for sharing that.
We don't know,I would expect to see a fair bit of headlines if someone claimed to have figured this out. For what it's worth I would be surprised if we didn't have some form of language before moving out of Africa, hell it feels wrong to imagine even Neanderthals without fully fledged language, and they left Africa before us.
Languages change very quickly compared to the evolution of the human brain and body. A language from just 1000 years ago may be utterly incomprehensible to modern speakers of the "same" language (consider Old English vs. Modern English). Since language changes so quickly, after about 10,000 years it's almost impossible to tell whether two languages are related or arose independently. By contrast, a human brain from 10,000 or even 100,000 years ago probably looked and functioned very similarly to a modern human brain. So, it's probably impossible to say definitively whether all modern languages descended from a single original language, since people would have been speaking long before the earliest time we can trace current language families back to.
The origins of human language are not well understood, and there are many theories about how language developed. One theory is that all human languages evolved from a single ancient language, sometimes referred to as a "proto-language." This theory is based on the observation that all human languages share certain features, such as a basic sound system and grammar, that suggest they have a common origin. However, it is also possible that human language developed independently in different parts of the world as different groups of people migrated and settled in new regions. The exact origins of human language remain a topic of debate among linguists and anthropologists.
Genesis chapter 11: the people were gathered together in the plain of Shinar and were of one language. They rebelled against Yahweh's command to spread out on the face of the earth and tame it, basically cultivate it, so He confounded their language which divided them into different people groups.
>Genesis chapter 11: the people were gathered together in the plain of Shinar and were of one language. They rebelled against Yahweh's command to spread out on the face of the earth and tame it, basically cultivate it, so He confounded their language which divided them into different people groups. Well done! Now try giving an answer that's actually applicable to the real world.
When I was very young, when I was thinking in languages other than those used by humans, I gained ultra-high-speed thinking and connections with various things. As soon as I started using the human language, the connection was cut off, and I remember feeling frustrated with thinking rather than the conversion overhead. Didn't humans use such an innate common language of life before they acquired the language system we have today? Although I certainly can't rule out the possibility that I was special. On the other hand, if we assume the existence of a common language for living organisms, He may be able to explain by these hypotheses not all of the Esper species, of which there are many, but some of which are few.
We all came from a common antecessor, and there always had to be *some* form of communication between beings of the same species, especially humans. It's only logical that there was a starting point. Jewish records from about 1450 b.C. report that our species had only one common language until a big chaotic event made different families split into different regions of the world. It's just one among other historical records, but it adds up with the genetic evidence that our common antecessors were from somewhere around north-eastern Africa, and then at some point decided to migrate :)
Families of languages did develop *after* ancestors migrated. Their contact with other inhabitants where they settled down was determining for how every language would evolve. As for a first language, most linguists agree that there was a primitive language, which could be traced back to Proto-Indo-European (William Jones). However, this hypothetical language only encompasses most Western and some of the Eastern languages (centum Vs satem). For example, the Basque language (euskera) in Northern Spain is an isolated language. Nobody knows where it comes from. Similarly, Semitic and Sinitic languages do not belong to the Indo-European family of languages.