13 Things About Language That Will Leave You Speechless

There is plenty of debate on this point. Some people argue that language may have only come around in the last 40–50,000 years (even though modern humans have been around for over 100,000 years). At the very least, that is when a great deal of cultural advances seemed to be taking place.

Pagel disagrees, though, and he uses a group of humans known as the San people to make that point. Genetic studies reveal that they were likely the first group to split from the original population of modern humans nearly 100,000 years ago — near the origin of our species. If both populations of humans have language, he said, then language must have existed before the split.

Homo erectus, an extremely long-lived species of early human, made the same handaxe for 40,000 generations. For context, modern humans haven't lived through anywhere near 40,000 generations throughout our whole evolutionary history. What's remarkable about that, Pagel said, is that it's the opposite of what you would expect of a species that had language.

Pagel said as a rough estimate that there are probably only about 40 to 60 sounds available for humans to use in communication (though this is controversial and depends largely on how one defines a unique sound). That’s because we all have the same tools to make noises — vocal chords, mouth, etc. "I could take any human being anywhere in the world and if I raised them in my language, they would have the same sounds as me," he said.

There have been a number of studies that have attempted to make this point using things like geographic patterns in the number of sounds different languages have. Pagel thinks you don't even need that level of work to come to the same conclusion.

He thinks that a single origin of language is the most likely explanation because all humans speak and speak equally well. "Any other explanation for why we all speak, and speak equally well, has to say that exactly the same highly complicated system evolved repeatedly, and that seems unlikely," he said.

“If two languages are separated from each other by about 500 years,” Pagel said, “they start to become mutually unintelligible.” Chaucer wrote Canterbury Tales nearly 600 years ago —in a form of English. Here’s an excerpt of that story in its original form:

“Amorwe, whan that day bigan to sprynge, Up roos oure Hoost, and was oure aller cok, And gadrede us to gidre alle in a flok, And forth we riden, a litel moore than paas unto the wateryng of Seint Thomas.”

Pretty foreign-sounding for a language still around today...

There are about 7,000 languages alive today, but only 10 languages account for around 50% of the world's speakers. Pagel said this is only a tiny fraction of the number of languages that have probably existed.

"You can do some simple calculations and try to estimate how many languages there have ever been spoken in the history of the world," he said. Depending on when you think humans started speaking, Pagel said, "we might have had something around the order of 130,000 or 140,000 languages in our history."

Pagel thinks it is going to be hard, if not impossible, for us to really know anything about the relationships of languages more than 10,000 years in the past. While we can group languages (into things like Indo-European, for example), he said that understanding the relationships and history that lead to those groups is "a question that probably will elude us." It's kind of like looking at the top of a complex evolutionary tree, but with the bottom 90% cut off.

Because sequencing the human genome is becoming so easy, Pagel said, "What will probably happen is that over the next probably 10 to 20 years … we'll probably be able to reconstruct an exceedingly accurate picture of how people occupied the world." That could help fill in some holes in our understanding of language since there wasn't really a way for language to be transmitted across large distances back in the day.