2/26: Searching for the origin of language

When you learn a language, you learn it as a fully-formed, achievable entity, perhaps with some historical context, but without a sense that it comes from a history that it traces back to tens of thousands of years in the past. But if we do start to look back in time, all questions of history lead to one: what is the origin of language itself? Where is the origin of language?

Often the search for language's origin begins with writing, the semi-permanent substantiation of language. Speech and sign are ephemeral, disappearing instantly without the hyper-modern inventions of the video/audio recorder — the choppy phrases you stumbled over in you 100 level language course are gone forever, thankfully, except from the structure of your mind. Writing, however, can be preserved much longer. Its ephemerality is only apparent in the vast scale of time, over thousands of years. So we might trace back to the first languages that were written down: Sumerian, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Hattic, Elamite, Hurrian, Anatolian, Old Chinese, Mycenean Greek, etc. Here, as with all searches for origin in history, we must be content with the limits of evidence we have discovered, until or unless a newer, earlier piece of writing is discovered. As of now, the oldest object(s) with writing that we know of are proto-cuneiform tablets like the Kish tablet.

But while the origin of writing can be substantiated through archaeological remnants from millennia past, ephemeral language, through speech and sign, necessarily precedes writing. Writing, from a certain point of view, is auxiliary to speech, a transcription that only has meaning because of the presence of its ephemeral, conversational counterpart. Humans certainly began speaking before they began writing anything down, at least. But how could scientists and researchers hunt for the ephemeral origin of speech, when sound and gesture both instantly disappear? There are no echoes of ancient sound across time.  

Without any concrete evidence, then, we could also try asking, instead of "Where is the origin of language?", "Does language only have a single origin?" Some linguists believe in a single proto-human language. This single language-form would be origin of all of the current, disparate language families, a Babel-esque tongue of sorts. This monogenetic theory of language is, of course, highly speculative. The Babel comparison is no joke; the search for one single origin of humanity does seem to have a religious bend. If all people come from one tongue and one place, it is easier to argue that they come from the origin of one God. Beyond this motivation, though, current technologies allow for more statistical, large-scale analysis of languages that could be used to support this argument. Some modern linguists have presented quantitative, historical arguments for placing an origin of human language, such as in this paper that places human language's origin in Africa, mirroring out-of-Africa theories of humanity's overall origin. But the lack of historical evidence — and the possibility that there will never be any historical evidence — makes these arguments difficult to substantiate in any meaningful way.

Placing an origin for speech, then, requires synthesizing and creating new archaeological and anthropological methods, beyond simply finding physical objects. One such method involves investigating visual representation and its origins more expansively, beyond just recognizable forms of "writing". In 2018, a linguist proposed that cave drawings might offer an origin for language — not only for writing, as may be expected, but for speech as well. Shigeru Miyagawa noted that cave drawings can often be found in so-called "acoustic hot spots, where sound echoes strongly," even if the place where the drawing was made is difficult to access physically. Miyagawa suggested that humans purposely used these spaces for drawings because of their auditory properties. This connection between sound and visual-representation could indicate early humans' experimentation and experience with "symbolic thinking," connecting auditory or speaking abilities with visual symbols in the drawings. It is exactly this connection, between a sound and a concept-image, that is essential for spoken human languages today, and it may extend back to the acoustic properties of ancient caves and the writing on the wall.  At the same time as writing, visuality, and permanence are auxiliary to ephemeral language, then, they may also be intimately connected to the origin of speech itself.

Another search for this elusive origin hypothesizes the importance of gesture in the etiology of language. Gesture is still important to modern language, not just for sign languages, but also for all forms of language, as a sort of auxiliary communication support. (Think about this next time you find yourself gesticulating wildly, or making a face, or positioning your body in order to make a point.) Some linguists believe that gesture, rather than (or in conjunction with) speech, is the origin of human language. It seems evolutionarily likely that our ancestors first gained cognitive control over our hands, rather than our vocal chords, and this story could also help explain the continued importance of gesture to all forms of language, residual from early human communication. Perhaps looking for a speech origin for language is misleading, and speech developed on the heels of gestural language as early humans gained control of their vocal chords.

There are, of course, a great number of possible areas for research and perspectives in the continued search for language's origin, such as analyzing human cognitive evolution — When did we begin to have the cognitive features that seem to be prerequisites for language, for example? It is also theoretically possible that we will develop new archaeological methods that can tell the story of history in different ways. Or maybe the origin of language is not writing, speech, drawings, or gestures, but something else entirely — the use of symbolic objects, or the movement of rocks. Furthermore, it's also not only possible, but almost certainly true, that the concept of an "origin" for language is misleading; language developed over centuries and millennia as a system of differentiating things from each other and communicating. Searching for the first utterance, or the first word, could not only be archaeologically difficult, but also potentially linguistically meaningless. There is no one moment when language began. I don't have the answers; no one does, yet. But human curiosity, the same curiosity that motivates you to learn a second or third language today, may continue to send us down the path to answers, and discoveries about ourselves along the way.