Humans resemble other animals in their ability to communicate. Communications involve chemical senses, sounds, body language, and visual signals. Communication is all about community, sharing information, sending warning signals and fulfilling the needs of the group. Human languages combine many different expressions of communication in a complex manner. Ideas about written language tend to dominate scholarly investigations, but sounds and gestures have been more important in the evolution of communication systems.

We can admire the utility and complexities of language and at the same time reveal the limitations, illusions and delusions inherent in language use. There are thousands of languages on planet earth. For many thousands of years, each local group had its own spoken language or its own version of a common language that extended over a larger geographic area. The origin of language will never be known with certainty, but it is reasonable to assume that many hominids spoke, perhaps for one million years or more. Spoken language is primary and written language is derivative. Writing is the most recent form of language, developed only in the past six thousand years. The invention of the printing press made books more widely available and newspapers proliferated. A sudden increase in volume and importance of written language in the past one hundred years is associated with an unprecedented increase in human populations and public education.

Written language is the vehicle for recording and communicating theories, concepts, discoveries in science and technologies. Written language is the basis of law and the regulation of human behavior in modern societies. Written language is the basis of commerce. Compared with speech, reading and writing are more constrained by formal rules, harder to learn and are more potent as a medium of generating and storing information. Before writing, all human history was an oral tradition that relied on stories that were past from generation to generation. Oral traditions are inherently conservative because important stories that formed the history of local groups were few in number and required memorization and faithful repetition. In claiming authenticity, a story-teller had to boast of accurate memory and faithful reproduction of a story that could be hundreds to thousands of years old. Of course, we know that memory is unreliable and stories do change with re-telling, so that there is no accurate history of the distant past.

Origins and Use of Language

A current pedagogical view of language emphasizes the reading and writing aspects of language and focuses on individual achievement, overlooking the fact the languages consist primarily of social behaviors that combine sounds and gestures Language functions are derived from and integrated with every other aspect of human behavior.  There is also a tendency to overlook the strange semantic habits of common language; to forget that humans are not usually rational thinkers and communicate in strange ways using clichés, slang, profanity, fabrications, similes, metaphors, simulations and substitutions when constructing their statements and stories.

The distinction between form and content is useful when we consider the diversity of human language. There is an underlying form for all human languages that allows each local group to add its content. The form specifies that there will be sounds that act as words and rules that regulate the assembly of sounds into statements. The content consists of specific sounds that act as words and local rules and inflections for assembling the sounds. To understand the evolution of language you have to inquire into the sound processing ability of animal brains. You then have to inquire into the new sound processing capability of the human brain.  To understand how language and cognition interface you have to inquire into the needs and ancient tendencies of humans to name and categorize objects and events and to use sounds to influence each others behavior.

Just as the brain links the inside needs to outside events in terms of finding nourishment and avoiding danger, speech links one human’s experiences to other humans. Language is deeply social and comes from ancient animal sources that are rooted in strategies of survival: facing hunger, danger and the need to for individuals to affiliate, and cooperate to sustain social groups. Speaking together is often an aspect of emotional displays, quite distant from the rational exchange of ideas and information that scholars identify as the primary function of language. Gary Snyder appreciates human language as an extension of animal intelligence and not as a radically new invention. Snyder stated:    “Language is a mind-body system that coevolved with our needs and nerves. Like imagination and the body, language rises unbidden… language is learned in the house and fields, not at school. Without ever being taught formal grammar, we utter syntactically correct sentences…without conscious device; we reach into the vast word-hoards in the depths of the wild unconscious.” 

Merlin Donald suggested that: ‘Spoken language increased the number and complexity of available words and grammars, and altered human culture by introducing a new level of shared representation… mimetic skills continue to serve traditional social purposes perfectly well, providing the cognitive foundation for institutions like dance, athletics, craft, ritual, and theatre.

"Oral language initially carved out its own sphere of influence within mimetic culture, eventually assuming a dominant and governing role in human cultures. Spoken language remains focused on the human world, particularly on relationships and this pattern extends to a wide range of cultures, from technologically primitive hunters and gatherers, to highly urbanized modern societies. The natural product of language is narrative thought; in this sense language, like mimesis, evolved primarily as a method of modeling reality...day-to-day storytelling in a shared oral culture eventually produces collective, standardized narrative versions of reality, particularly of past events; and these become the dominant myths of a society.” 

An anthropological view emphasizes the social derivation and social functions of spoken language. Every human group that has been studied uses names to develop taxonomies of kin relations,  fauna, flora and weather patterns. A basic syntax emerges with these taxonomies. In his study of folk biology, Scott Atran suggested that humans talk about plants and animals using taxonomies composed of essence-based, species-like groups, ranking species into lower and higher order groups.This tendency is naturally selected to grasp relevant and recurrent patterns in the world out there. Atran argues, as I do, that the tendency to categorize comes before language. Semantics and syntax emerge together as tools of sorting and collecting observations about flora, fauna and other humans. Humans have an innate interest is living things that move and usually begin their taxonomy with two categories, animals and plants. Taxa names are arbitrary (primary lexemes) and folk groupings may be based on obvious characteristics such as four-legged land animals as distinct from two-legged animals with wings that fly.

An evolutionary view understands language as an elaboration of the rich complexities of animal communications that combine body movements and sounds to pass information from individual to individual.  Hominids were not silent creatures who suddenly spoke to each other but were vocal, demonstrative, emotional creatures who gradually spoke to each other with more specificity and complexity, developing speaking skills for long time (measured in millions of years.) I believe that all advanced thinkers in the 21st century and beyond will understand that spoken language is a natural ability of the brain that has evolved gradually. Since all other hominids are extinct, we will never know who spoke first and when. There is no reason to believe that spoken language is a recent development.

Our closest living relatives, the chimps, are remarkably expressive primates whose vocalizations, social behavior and body language resembles ours, but they have not developed a language comparable to human language.

Chimpanzees are content to live in small groups and communicate effectively with gestures, body language and sounds, but without using words arranged as statements. While some chimps learn by interaction with human teachers to use a sign language and can use keyboard symbols to construct simple statements, they do not develop a language on their own. Their communication abilities, however impressive, are different from the human ability to communicate with words and syntax.

The relative increase in size and complexity of human frontal and temporal lobes are the immediate physical correlates of the increasing communication skills that have allowed humans to dominate planet earth. Humans are obligate social creatures that depend on language to achieve and sustain affiliations. Talking is the main tool of group cohesion and the main method of creating and resolving disputes. When there is conflict, humans talk first and if talking fails, they fight, injuring or killing each other.

Humans still regard standing to speak as a powerful expression of high status in a group. Humans routinely gather to listen to one person standing and speaking even if the speaker has little to say. The speakers wear costumes that reveal occupation, social rank and, kin membership. Speakers tell stories with dramatic gestures, animal cries, shouts, dance, drumming and emotional displays.

More About Sounds and Gestures

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