Although there aren’t courses offered at MSU for it, there is a subfield of Linguistics (my major) called Evolutionary Linguists. The field itself doesn’t necessarily focus on the evolution of humans themselves, but it does focus on how language formed over time. It’s believed that all languages came from one “mother language” and branched out into the various languages we have today, similar to how we believe people started out in one place and branched into what we are today.
One way to decipher some proto-languages, or language families, is to compare languages in the same group (such as romance languages) and use similarities in words to find what commonalities they have. By finding out what words may have sounded like before the languages split apart, we can figure out how the ancestor language may have sounded. Though even with some writing available, we can’t know for sure how the oldest languages were actually spoken.
One of the other aspects of Linguistics is called universal grammar, proposed by Chompsky, that theorizes there is a genetic innateness to language. All of the languages we speak today may seem incredibly different, but there are general similarities to how language is processed in the brain.
A study done by an evolutionary linguist took several groups of people and taught them nonsense words. They were unorganized, but they did use some grammatical components, such as nouns, adjectives, and plurals. They did not specify to the first group what meant what exactly, that is they would teach one word meaning “white elephants”, “white lions”, “pink elephant”, and so forth with several morphemes having the possible meaning “elephant” or “white.” They would then have the first group teach it to a second group, the second to a third, and so on.
They found that as language passed down from each “generation”, or evolved as a language, it became more and more rigid and structured naturally, without any provocation from scientists. This type of study can help us figure out possibilities for the beginning forms of language, and help us understand how language has morphed with the evolution of humanity.
As language has played such a major role in the development of humans, we wouldn’t have such complex societies without it, I personally feel like the study of evolution goes hand in hand with linguistics, even if many linguists focus primarily on current language shifts. Evolution can help us understand how we grew to produce language, both physically and mentally, and it can give us insight into what the early stages of language may have sounded like. Unfortunately we will never be able to know exactly what early language may have been, I feel that by studying our ancestors we can eventually get close.
I found this post very interesting and it got me wondering what causes languages to split off and sound the way they do. I assume that when people began migrating out of Africa and dividing into smaller sub-populations this led to the division of spoken languages. What’s interesting is what caused the new languages to sound the way they do. Was it a physiological difference in the tongue and mouth that affected how different people formed sounds? Was it a difference in the speech center of the brain between these groups? Was it sounds from the environment around them that they took in and assigned meaning to based on where, when, or why they heard them? To me it seems most likely that the environment surrounding people and the sounds they heard caused the great differences in languages that we see today.
Hi Courtney!
I find it very interesting the way you connected your major of linguistics to human evolution. I was unaware to the fact that there is a subfield of linguistics called evolutionary linguistics. I like the way you connected the fact that humans all started as one form and branched out to all the different races we have today similar to the way we had a “mother language” and branched out to all the languages we have today. I was actually unaware to the fact that it was a belief that there was a “mother language” I always assumed that multiple languages were created from different colonies around the world, so I liked the idea that there was only one language at one time. I also thought the universal grammar idea and experiment you explained was very interesting. Evolution and linguistics definitely go hand in hand with the way our society has developed and how individuals have developed.