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LESSON 6

ACCOUNTS ON THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

• In 1859 when Charles Darwin published “The Origin of Species, it gives interest to the Origin
and evolution of language.
• In 1866 at the time the Influential Société de Linguistique de Paris impose a ban; excluding all
theorizing about language evolution from the scientific discourse for more than a century.
(Christiansen & Kirby, 2003)
• Interest in language evolution was rekindled “Origins and Evolution of Language and speech
(New York Academy of Sciences in 1975)
• The book Natural Language and Natural Selection proposed the theory that the human ability
for language is a complex biological adaptation evolved by way of natural selection.
• Language has evolved as an innate specialization to code propositional information.
• OTHER SOURCES SAY:

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 • According to the Greeks diversity in speech was brought by the god Hermes and along with it
separation and discord ensued; the Bible narrates the story of the “Tower of Babel” (Genesis
11:1–9) to explain the phenomenon of multi-linggualism that led to “disharmony”. (Sharma,
2017)
• In North America believe in a Great Deluge that separated people and their speech while those
in Africa believe in great famine as the cause of different languages.
• These discourses/explanations underline the politics of dominance and the
natural/geographical intervention as the probable reasons for so much diversity in languages.

I. LANGUAGE ORIGIN THEORIES

• (a)Interjectional or pooh-pooh.
• (b)imitative, onomatopoeic, or bow-wow.
• (c)imitative of sounds produced when objects are struck, or ding-dong.
• (d)work-chant, or yo-he-ho.
• (e)mouth-gesture, or ta-ta , in which mouth parts imitate the movements of hands, arms, or
other body parts.
• (f)babbleluck, based on acquisition of associations between spontaneous infant babbling
sounds and features in the external environment.
• (g)instinctivist, in which language appears at a certain level of human cognitive evolution, and
is inborn thereafter.
• (h) conventionalist, in which individuals deliberately agree to create language in order to
improve their social life
• (i)contact, in which language is the natural outcome of man's social, communicative needs.
• (j) divine or miraculous, in which language is a gift of the Creator.
• (k) chance mutation, in which language is the outcome of a random biological event.
• (1) gestural sign, in which propositional communication was initially by hand and arm
movements, with vocal language appearing later (Hewes, 1973)

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II. Otto Jespersen’s Language Origin Hypotheses
✓ 1894 book “Progress in Language is devoted to the origins of human language in which a
central role is played by Darwin’s idea of “predaptation”
✓ The idea that biologic structures typically do not originate ex nihilo but are adaptation of
already existing structures that had different functions.
✓ He criticizes his predecessors for tacitly assuming that the creation of language man had
remained mute or silent
✓ He argues the theories of the origin of language
o Bow-wow
o Ding-dong
o Yo-heave-ho
• The source of proto-vocabulary to which Jespersen attached particular weight is song
• Singing plays a wide variety of social roles.
• Traditional songs of many communities involve nonsense syllables (Tralala and the like)
• He hypothesized that singing was an important component of the fabric of Pre-linguistic
communities
• Communities developed large bodies of songs, specific association (e.g. songs
commemorating, battles, courtship
• There is a linguistic change to increase the efficiency of the language
o broadening the scope
o reducing all of the different kinds of effort that go into acquiring, using and maintaining
the language.

REFERENCES:

• Chomsky, N. (nd). Knowledge of Language. In N. Chomsky, Knowledge of Language (p. p. 302).

• Christiansen, M. H., & Kirby, S. (2003). Language Evolution. United States: Oxford University Press Inc.,.

• Hewes, G. W. (1973). Primate communication and the gestural origin of Language. Current Antrophology Vol. 14,
No. 1-2, February-April 1973, 14(1-2), 1-24.
• McCawley, J. D. (1992). The Biological side of Otto Jespersen's linguistic thought. Historiographia Linguistica,
19:1, 97-110.

• Sharma, S. K. (2017). The Tower of Babble: Mother Tongue and multilingualism in India. East European Journal
of Psycholinguistics, 4(1), 188–204.

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