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Asked by to Suzanne on 26 Dec 2017. This question was also asked by .
Question: What was the first language?
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Suzanne Harvey answered on 26 Dec 2017:
As someone who studies primate communication, this is a question I think about all the time! The answer depends on how you define a language. Humans and baboons split around 30 million years ago in our evolutionary tree, but our research shows that modern baboons use a range of sounds to communicate different meanings. Many different species of monkeys have different calls for predators like eagles and leopards, and some can change meanings depending on the order of their calls, like humans do when constructing sentences.
So, while human languages are far more complex than other primate communication, language has been developing for many millions of years. The first language may even have existed before humans evolved!
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Damien commented on :
The last couple of episodes of ‘Blue Planet II’ had something about that: clownfish chirping differently if they thought they were under attack than if they weren’t. Not primates, but also not humans, yet still using different sounds to communicate different things!
Damien commented on :
If we’re talking about human language, then it’s probably impossible to tell which was the first one. The reason is that writing was only invented quite recently, in terms of evolution–people have only been writing for about 5,000 years. The earliest texts we have are in Sumerian, from the Middle East. People have been speaking for much longer than that, though. But that means that, before writing was invented, we have no direct record of how people were speaking. Based on the languages that exist now, and the languages we’ve got records of, we can do what’s called reconstruction, and get some idea of what language sounded like before there was writing, but it gets more and more unreliable the further back in history you go.
It’s also possible that several languages in different parts of the world are as old as each other. This could be true because the people who spoke those languages didn’t speak to each other–they had no contact with each other–so their languages didn’t come from the same original source. But, at that time-depth, it’s just really hard to tell!
dat boi commented on :
so samiran is the erliest known language?
Damien commented on :
It’s the earliest one we have any writing in. But we know stuff about language earlier than that–not because of direct evidence like writing, but because we can look at the way we know some languages have changed more recently, and say that the same kind of change must have happened in the past.
I’m talking about changes in the way language sounds. For example, we know what British English sounds like now, and we know what it sounded like 100 years ago, so we can work out how it must have changed between 100 years ago and now. And we can also look at the type of sounds we have in British English (different vowels and consonants), and we might be able to find the same types of sounds in Sumerian, and assume that it must have changed in the same way.
It works like this. In British English, now, we say the word ‘my’ so it sounds a bit like ‘mah-ee’. 100 years ago, (posh) people used to say it more like ‘meh-ee’, so we can call that a sound change from eh-ee to ah-ee for the vowel in ‘my’. Now, if we can work out what sounds are meant by the Sumerian texts we have, we can say, ‘If there’s a vowel that was probably pronounced ah-ee in this Sumerian text, then a bit before this text was written, that vowel might have been pronounced eh-ee’. In that way, we have knowledge of spoken language from before we have texts.