How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

by Daniel L. Everett

In fact, all animals communicate, receiving and transmitting information to other animals, whether of their own or different species.

No snake can tell you what it wants to do tomorrow or how it feels about the weather. Messages like those require language, the most advanced form of communication earth has yet produced.

I deny here that language is an instinct of any kind, as I also deny that it is innate, or inborn.

My research suggests that language began with Homo erectus more than one million years ago, and has existed for 60,000 generations.

Homo erectus, upright man, the most intelligent creature that had ever existed until that time.

Homo sapiens unsurprisingly improved on what erectus had done, but there are languages still spoken today that are reminiscent of the first ever spoken, and they are not inferior to other modern languages.

Homo sapiens means ‘wise man’, and suggests, erroneously as we see, that modern humans (we are all Homo sapiens) are the only wise or intelligent humans. We are almost certainly the smartest. But we are not the only smart humans who ever lived.

Today, there is no universal human language, whether or not there was at some period in the remote past. And there is no mental template for grammar that humans are born with. Languages’ similarities are not rooted in a special genetics for language.

Language gradually emerged from a culture, formed by people who communicated with one another via human brains. Language is the handmaiden of culture.

from the emergence of our species to the more than 7,000 languages spoken today. Their complexity and range was invented by our species, later developing into local variants, each new linguistic community altering language to fit its own culture.

Language did not begin with gestures, nor with singing, nor with imitations of animal sounds. Languages began via culturally invented symbols.

This combination of brain and culture explains why only humans have ever been able to talk.

Conversations are the apex of linguistic studies and sources of insight particularly because they are potentially open-ended in meaning and form.

who spoke first?

sign progression theory of language origin.

language emerges gradually from indexes (items that represent things they are physically connected to, such as a footprint to an animal) to icons (things that physically resemble the things they are used to represent, such as a portrait for the real person) and finally by creating symbols (conventional ways of representing meaning that are largely arbitrary).

scientists have finally managed to put together enough of the extremely small pieces of the language evolution puzzle to give a reasonable idea of how human languages came about.

Communication systems of the animal kingdom are unlike human language.

Only human languages have symbols and only human languages are significantly compositional, breaking down utterances into smaller meaningful parts, such as stories into paragraphs, paragraphs into sentences, sentences into phrases and phrases into words.

Eventually, Homo species developed social complexity, culture and physiological and neurological advantages over all other creatures.

Communication is nothing more than the (usually intentional) transference of information from one entity to another,

Because humans can talk they can plan, they can share knowledge, they can even leave knowledge for future generations. And therein lies the human advantage over all other terrestrial species.

Language is the interaction of meaning (semantics), conditions on usage (pragmatics), the physical properties of its inventory of sounds (phonetics), a grammar (syntax, or sentence structure), phonology (sound structure), morphology (word structure), discourse conversational organisational principles, information and gestures. Language is a gestalt – the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That is to say, the whole is not understood merely by examining its individual components.

onomatopoeic word

phenotypes (visible behaviours and physical characteristics)

awareness. Gradually our ancestors’ consciousness

Erectus’s achievement of self-conscious cognition quite possibly enabled them to (eventually) talk about, characterise, contextualise and classify their emotions – love, hate, fear, lust, loneliness and happiness.

Our ancestors in all likelihood also began to keep track of their kith and kin on their travels. And this growing knowledge, as it emerged from their evolving culture and travels, would have eventually required them to invent language of some sort (with their relatively enormous brains).

Culture transforms ‘things’ into symbols and meaning. And if erectus had symbols, it had language.

clearly that erectus cooperated for a common goal, utilising innovative technology. Such accomplishments imply the ability to communicate at a level more advanced than any creature until that time.

ambiguity and vagueness are rarely problems because context usually enables the hearer to pick out the meaning the speaker intended.

In other words, language first needed symbols, utterances and conversations before it created a grammar to structure, and thereby enhance, our communication.

Alex the parrot, who, according to years of research by Irene Pepperberg, spoke (some) English and could understand even grammars with recursion and tree structures.

Lack of arbitrariness therefore means that indexes are unable to serve as the basis for language.

Language and speech came later and exploited human bodies and brains as evolution had produced them, altering them over time.

Language as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Evolution is about the physical survival of the fittest.

human brains rewire around damaged areas and repurpose undamaged areas that are no longer needed for their original functions.

human brain grew so quickly and reached such a large size relative to the rest of their bodies.

Other studies have shown that the connections between portions of the brain can weaken or strengthen over time, based on the cultural experiences of the individual.

The brain uses and reuses its various areas in order to accomplish all of the challenges that modern humans confront.

Gram for gram, the brain is far and away the most complex object we know of in the universe, and we simply haven’t figured out its basic plan yet

Remember that erectus sailed. This activity alone demonstrates that erectus was able to think ahead, to imagine and to communicate.

The human brain must be able to follow conversations, use words appropriately, remember and execute pronunciations, decode pronunciations it hears from others, keep track of the stories in the conversations, remember who is being talked about and follow topics through long discussions.

How is it that the brain enables people to speak? And what prevents other animals from having language?

humans do both of these, producing and perceiving speech, without the slightest effort when they are healthy.

Though there are hundreds of sounds in the world’s 7,000+ languages, they are all named and produced according to these procedures. And what is even more important, these few simple procedures, using parts of the body that evolved independently of language – the teeth, tongue, larynx, lungs and nasal cavity – are sufficient to say anything that can be said in any language on the planet. Very exciting stuff.