Question: Why do we have vastly different languages, even though we are the same race?

Carolyn McGettigan answered on 8 Jan 2018:

Great question. Languages around the world can differ quite a lot in how they sound, and how the words are put together to make sense. There are also languages that are not spoken – signed languages that are often used by Deaf people.

However, all of these languages have some key properties, and they all achieve the same outcome: they allow us to exchange information with other humans about our own thoughts. In some ways, you can think of language as being a way of thinking, and the precise way in which it is spoken/signed is just the “way the job gets done” – so, you can write a letter to a friend via email or in the post, but it’s still doing the same job. While many other species have ways of communicating (as you’ll have seen in the Christmas lectures!), only humans have language.

But why do we have all these different ways of doing the same thing? Well, that is partly due to geography – different groups of people will have developed their own languages with the humans around them, in different parts of the world. Remember that for long periods of time different populations of humans will have existed quite separately from each other. Over hundreds and thousands of years, those separate languages developed their own systems of sound, a vocabulary and set of rules for how they work. Today, you can see large differences between some languages, and similarities between others, which partly reflects those languages’ origins. You can also see how languages change and intermix – lots of English words have their origins in French, stemming in part from French invasions of England in the past.

With greater capacity for communication and travel all over the world, will all our different languages eventually merge into one human language? Well, it’s definitely possible that every human baby on the planet could learn the same language from birth, but it may not be likely that this would ever fully happen. There was once an attempt to invent a single language that would allow people from different countries to communicate more easily – it was called Esperanto, and while it was learned by a lot of people, its success was limited.