When did Languages Come Into Being?
From Genesis, the first book of the Bible, the reader may infer that Adam was able to speak as soon as he had been created, for he was given a task at once:“And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” To name the animals,and in that way to invent part of the language, was Adam’s first duty. Still, he did not create language as such. It came into being several days before he did, as can be deduced. Almost the first thing that happens in the Bible, at dawn on the first day, is that God says “Let there be light.” Evidently, God was able to speak from the very beginning. Even if we do not accept this version of creation, the text merits consideration for it reveals something of how people tend to think about language and our relation to it.
In the first place, it is remarkable that Adam was created with language built in, as it were. It would have been quite possible to imagine that man was created first and language was added later on. Children cannot speak at birth, and humans in the primordial state could have been speechless like children. Instead, it is precisely the capacity to speak and to name that is represented as specifically human in the narration of the Bible. That capacity makes all the difference in relation to the animals, who have to receive their names from man. Adam is superior to the animals, and language is his instrument of domination.
Secondly, God himself speaks at the very beginning.This may also seem somewhat strange, for he had no one to talk to. On the other hand, it would be even stranger to imagine a dumb God. It is not easy to envision a divinity that resembles man in any way without assuming that this being can speak. It is not necessary, of course, to believe that the god is intelligible. He or she may speak some other, more exalted language than the ones used by humans. But a god who did not speak at all would be a fool or an animal.A being who is human, or superior to man, must master man’s most important faculty: language.
Nowadays we believe that our species was not created in a moment but developed from earlier forms that were more similar to apes than we are. But at what point in time did humans actually become human? In other words, when did the earlier forms become so similar to us that we are willing to admit that they were of the same kind as we are?
An answer quite often suggested is to propose that humans became human exactly when language appeared, and this is in fact quite in line with the narration of the Bible. It is natural for us to think that humans are beings who possess a human language.
This does not provide us with a precise answer to the question of when humans first appeared. We do not know when the first utterance was spoken. It is true that many gifted people from antiquity onwards have tried to figure out when and how this happened, but the results are not impressive.
We can be absolutely sure that human languages have existed for at least five thousand years, since this is the approximate age of the first surviving written representations of language. The languages first used in writing, Sumerian and Egyptian, do not differ at all from languages spoken today in their general properties. It seems certain that there have been languages of the kind spoken today for a much longer time.
How long is not at all clear.There are no direct clues, and so all suggestions are speculative. Mainly, people have tried to find a reasonable answer by using two kinds of evidence. One is information about the general cultural development of man in prehistoric times. This is provided by archaeological findings, artifacts of many kinds. The other kind of fact is about the anatomical development of man. Again, archaeology supplies material in the form of bones from different periods.
Forty Thousand or Two Million Years?
Archaeology can tell what tools, made of stone or bones, were used in different periods. Further, there are sculptures, engravings,and paintings that can be dated. From this material it is possible to draw the conclusion that during the last forty thousand years or so, humans seem to have had the same capacity for invention and the same creativity found among (some) modern people. For example, they have been able to invent tools and to create works of art. From this it is generally inferred that at least during this period people have also been using languages with the same basic features as the ones used today. Before that, for a period of around two million years, stone tools were made, and gradually became more sophisticated. However, there are few signs that the people who made them were trying in any way to express themselves artistically.
Thus the archaeological evidence clearly suggests that languages with grammars and vocabularies similar to today’s have been spoken for at least 40,000 years. If those who make tools have to be able to speak, languages must have existed for much longer, conceivably as long as a couple of million years. But no one knows whether there really is such a connection between the two skills.
The experts on the anatomy of pre-modern humans contend that the type of people that exists now, Homo sapiens sapiens, has not changed in any substantial way for about 100,000 or 150,000 years.This means, among other things, that during this period people have been equipped with the same type of brain and speech organs as we have today, so presumably neither intellectual nor anatomical problems prevented them from using languages. Their tongues were as mobile as ours, their larynges had vocal cords just like ours, and their brains were equipped with all those amazing convolutions we know are needed in order to speak and to understand speech.
In earlier periods this was not necessarily so. Before the appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens, and for some time after that, there were Neanderthal men. Their brains were at least as large as ours are, on average, but the form of their skulls and jaws differed from ours in some respects. This may have prevented them from pronouncing certain speech sounds that are in common use now. However, this is by no means certain, since the remains of Neanderthal people consist only of fragments of bones, and speech is produced through activities in the soft tissue of the mouth and throat. Scholars who work with this problem therefore have to calculate the shape of the soft tissue from the shape of the bones, which is quite difficult. The types of humans who existed before Neanderthal man had bones in the head that differed even further from ours, so it is more probable that they could not speak like us for physiological reasons.
The net result of all this, then, is that we can be reasonably certain that languages like the ones we use have existed for at least 40,000 years, but that they may have been in use for much longer. The upper limit is about 2,000,000 years ago, that is, around the time when man first began to produce stone tools.
What was the Reason?
Thus there is an answer of sorts to the question of when language first appeared. It is of course related to the second question, how languages originated. That problem is even more difficult.
Human languages are the most highly developed and the most flexible systems for communication we know of. The distinctive feature of those systems is that they can be used to convey messages of any degree of complexity in an incredibly swift and efficient manner.
What makes our languages so completely different from the means of communication that are used by other mammals is their degree of complexity, their variability, and their adaptability. Still, there are certain similarities. The signals we employ are sounds produced through the mouth. The air we breathe out is used to create resonance in the upper respiratory tract. Most mammals use the same principle for their production of sounds. Dogs bark, cats meow, mice squeak, horses neigh, and monkeys chatter. All these sounds are made in basically the same manner. Since so many genetically related species produce sounds in a similar way it seems probable that the precursors of man did so too, long before our species had developed.
The sounds of other mammals are also signals, and they are used for contacts with other individuals belonging to the species. They differ from our languages primarily in that their systems for signalling meaning are not very highly developed. It is true that each species can produce several different kinds of sound, and in that way they can to some extent convey different messages. A dog has at its disposal a number of calls to express different attitudes such as threat, fear, sympathy, and so on. People who study communication among animals have found that many species have tens of different signals. Several species of monkey possess fairly large systems, comprising many tens of distinctive sounds. Interestingly, our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, do not seem to use sounds for communication in any way more advanced than many monkeys.
Human speech differs from the cries of other species in many ways. One very important distinction is that all other animals use one call for one message as the general principle of communication. This means that the number of possible messages is very restricted. If a new message is to be included in the system, a new sound has to be introduced, too. After the first few tens of sounds it becomes difficult to invent new distinctive sounds, and also to remember them for the next time they are needed.
Human speech builds on the principle of combining a restricted number of sounds into an unlimited number of messages. In a typical human language there are something like thirty or forty distinctive speech sounds. These sounds can be combined into chains to form a literally unlimited number of words. Even a small child, who can communicate by only one word at a time, uses a system for communication that is infinitely superior to any system utilized by any other animal. The number of words is unlimited, while other species have a very restricted number of signals.
In addition to this, human languages also allow several words to be combined into an utterance. Through this process we are able to create an infinite number of sentences with even a small number of words. This basic property of our languages allows them to express ideas that can be as complex and as subtle as anyone wants. The system has no theoretical limit as to what messages can be conveyed. In principle, everything can be said.
No one knows why or how this marvelous system came about. It is obvious that it must have involved some evolution of the species, as no other animals talk, but all humans do. For more than a century, questions about ultimate causes for evolution have been discussed within the Darwinian framework. That is, the basic assumption is that the capacity for language has evolved because of evolutionary pressure. There had to be some decisive advantage for those individuals who could express themselves well and understand the expressions of others.
Surprisingly, there is still no agreement on what this advantage might have been. Since people speak to each other, it should somehow reasonably be connected with social relations (although even that has been contested). It might be natural to think that with language, people cooperate better within their group, and that gives an advantage to the group. However, that answer is not in line with modern Darwinist thinking, according to which the evolutionary advantage has to favor an individual, and not a group. This is because only an individual, not a group, can transmit a trait to her or his offspring.
For this reason, evolutionary theory runs into difficulties with language, as with much other co-operative behavior. Recent proposals to solve the dilemma are that language evolved because people who can speak can gain advantages by lying; because people can position themselves in society by providing others with gossip; or because they can develop rituals that work to their advantage. The best I can say about these ideas is that they are difficult to disprove. In the absence of good evidence, speculation will probably continue.
It seems impossible to know, then, why language developed. Thoughts about how it developed are only slightly less speculative. But it may well be that the two fundamental properties of languages developed in sequence. In that case, the first step was the technique of employing a limited number of sounds for an unlimited number of words.This technique may have developed gradually over a very long time.
A language of that kind might have been very useful.As long as one is content to talk about what is important here and now, isolated words might work quite well: “Deer,” “Throw!” “Good!” “Cut!” “Fry!” “Sleep,” and so on. There are taciturn people nowadays who prefer to speak in that manner, if they have to speak at all, and usually one is quite able to understand what they mean.
Problems arise if one wants to speak about something that is not there to be seen. For example, if one wants to tell a companion to come down the valley to pick raspberries in a new place, it may not be sufficient to say “Raspberries!” It may be necessary to say and point, or to combine two spoken messages: “Raspberries! Go!” or “Raspberries! There!” or something similar. This opens the road towards two-word utterances, and from there on to complete sentences with pronouns, mood, subordination, and other refinements. This cannot have happened all at once, but probably languages developed gradually over many, many thousands of years. At last languages reached such a level that they could be used for unambiguous conversation about the future and the past and about what could be as well as about what really is.
If this was so, our ancestors may have communicated in a more advanced way than any other species for millions of years, even if human languages as we know them have not existed for more than a fraction of that time. Perhaps a very long time was needed for the development of language. That time may have been long enough for changes to be effected in the speech organs and in the brain.
This means that the ability to use words may have developed gradually around the time when stone tools came into use, between one and two million years ago. Utterances consisting of several words may have appeared much later. The full development of speech systems, with embedded clauses and other complexities, may have been completed less than a hundred thousand years ago.
However this may have been, it seems certain that the kind of languages we use existed for at least 40,000 years. This means that in the Early Iron Age, when all human beings lived as gatherers and hunters and used tools made of bone and stone, languages were fully developed and could have had large vocabularies, complex sentences, and all other features that are found in languages of today.
The Languages of Gatherers and Hunters
In and around the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa live people traditionally called Bushmen in English. In recent years, the term used to designate this group is San. Up to a generation ago, many San people lived on what they could get through hunting and through gathering edible roots and fruits. They owned nothing beyond the loincloth that they wore and the few weapons and utensils that they carried. Some very small groups still live more or less in this way, as did all human beings up to about ten thousand years ago, when agriculture first appeared.
The San people and their culture, as well as similar groups in other parts of the world, tell us something about what life may have been like for most of the time during which man has existed. Of course, not all hunters and gatherers lived in the same way, for there were certainly great variations over the world due to climate, availability of food, and local traditions. Still one may draw some conclusions about the life of gatherers and hunters in earlier ages from studying San and other present-day gatherers and hunters.
Right now, the life of the San people is changing very rapidly. Owing to contacts with modern society, their traditional lifestyle is disappearing. Their new situation is very problematic, and may bring about the disappearance of their very cultural identity, and also their languages. Here I will discuss only the traditional life and languages of the San peoples, disregarding the great changes of recent decades.
The languages of the San peoples form a group that is usually called Khoisan. One of the languages of this group, Nama (or Khoekhoegowab) is spoken by more than a hundred thousand sedentary people in Namibia, but they are not included in the following comments. There are several other Khoisan languages. The total number of people speaking these languages is about seventy thousand, which means that fairly few people speak each language.
These languages have not been well described. On the whole they are not used in writing and exist only as spoken languages. The speakers have lived in relative isolation in or near the desert. But some missionaries,anthropologists,and linguists have studied and described several of these languages.This is no easy task, as I quickly learned in some feeble attempts of my own.The first problem is to establish contacts between people with fundamentally different languages and different cultures, who may also have different attitudes towards the contact itself. A linguist should preferably live with the speakers for a year or longer in order to make a full and reliable description. But that is usually impossible for practical reasons.Among those who are still gatherers and hunters, the very presence of a researcher is both a problem and a big change. The ones who live as farm labourers close to the desert are generally beset by serious problems.They need teachers, health care, and social workers much more than they need people who ask about their way of talking.
In spite of such problems we now know a great deal about the Khoisan languages. We can build on that knowledge to make some informed guesses about the linguistic situation during most of the time human beings of our kind have existed.
Were Languages then Just Like Languages Now?
The first and most important thing that has to be said about languages in societies of gatherers and hunters is that there is in principle no difference between these and other languages. It is often believed that languages spoken in societies where the material culture is not highly developed are also simpler and in some way less developed than the language we speak. Many linguists thought so in the nineteenth century. But this is not true.
This requires some explanation, and certain reservations should be made. What does it mean to say that a language is developed, or that it is not developed? One may think of various properties of languages when making this kind of judgement. One may think about the linguistic system, that is to say the sounds, the word forms, and the way sentences are formed. Further one may think of the vocabulary, if there are words and expressions to denote everything that needs to be said and understood, if it is possible to express subtle shades of meaning and if the same thing can be said in several different ways. And finally one may think of the written language and its tradition, how many books are published in the language, if there are good authors who have written in the language, and so on.
When linguists maintain that Khoisan languages, or American Indian languages, are just as developed as the large European languages, what they are talking about is the linguistic system.All the fundamental features of spoken languages all over the world are the same. Each language has a set of distinctive sounds that are combined into meaningful words. Each language has ways to denote grammatical notions like person (“I, you, he”), singular or plural, present or past time, and more. Each language also has rules governing how the words are to be combined to form complete utterances.
In their details languages differ greatly, as is well known. It is not true that all languages are equally difficult at all levels, a fact easy to observe by any language learner. For example, the English language has a highly elaborated system of vowels and diphthongs, while Spanish has only five basic vowels. On the other hand, the verbs in Spanish have many more forms than the verbs in English. Any attempt to make a comprehensive assessment of the difficulty or the “development” of these two languages would entail a decision about whether vowels contribute more to difficulty than verb forms,or vice versa.It is very hard to find criteria for such decisions. In their totality, both languages are highly complex and very difficult to master. This does not necessarily mean that all languages are at exactly the same level when it comes to difficulty or development in this sense, but it is hard to find major differences.
The Khoisan languages all have very complex sound systems. They have more vowels and many more consonants than is found in any European language.This is partly because all these languages have special consonants, called clicks; they are used as speech sounds only in southern Africa. In addition, they use more consonants than we do even if the clicks are not counted.
One Khoisan language, called !Xóõ, has a larger number of speech sounds than any other known language. There are more than a hundred distinctive sounds, as compared with thirty or forty in most other languages. On the other hand, both in !Xóõ and in many other Khoisan languages the number of different forms for each verb is small, and the rules for sentence formation are mostly simple. So those language systems are difficult as far as the sounds are concerned, but fairly simple in other ways.
This is not true for languages used among gatherers and hunters in other parts of the world. The Australian Aborigines spoke many different languages when the Europeans arrived. Most of these are very simple as far as the sound systems are concerned. Several of them have less than twenty distinctive sounds, which is about as low as is reported for any human language. But their systems for inflecting words are very advanced, so that one single complex verb may sometimes express a meaning that has to be rendered by several clauses in English. An example from the Australian language Rembarrnga is yarran mǩȤ-kuȤpi-popna-ni-yuwa.This form with six components is to be understood, according to the leading authority, R. M. W. Dixon, as “it [the kangaroo] might smell our sweat as we try to sneak up on it.” So the Australian languages are simple when it comes to sounds, but difficult at other levels.
This shows that languages in cultures of gatherers and hunters are just like other languages in terms of sounds and grammar: they are simple in some ways, and complex in others, just like English or Spanish or Arabic.As far as the language systems are concerned, the languages we speak are fully comparable with the languages spoken among gatherers and hunters of today,and presumably with those spoken by our ancestors when they were gatherers and hunters. On average, languages do not become more or less complex. They just vary.
Vocabulary and Society
When it comes to vocabulary, and the possibilities to express concepts, the situation is different. The capacity to create new words or to borrow words from other languages exists in all languages of the world, so in theory each language can have words for everything. But in practice the vocabularies of languages often differ greatly. The words and expressions in use in a language are those needed and adequate in the culture within which the language is spoken. Languages used in very diverse cultures therefore have very diverse vocabularies.
The vocabulary of a Khoisan language, for example Ju|’hoan, is just the vocabulary needed by hunters and gatherers in and around the Kalahari Desert. There are many names for animals and plants, including some that may not have names of their own in any other language. Words for human relations and for human emotions are at least as numerous as in European languages, and so are, of course, words for the parts of the human body, for life and death, and so on. There are also many words that can be used in mythical narratives and for religious concepts. Generally speaking the language possesses rich resources for expression of all that is normally spoken about in the environment where it is used.
But much that is found in European languages has been lacking in Ju|’hoan until the last few decades. Of course there have been no words to denote modern technology, such as cars or television, but there have also been no words for many things we regard as familiar and obvious, such as houses, furniture, household utensils, and clothes. As the San people have lived in small groups without permanent leaders there are no traditional words that have to do with state or constitution, law or police. They have not conducted any wars, so there have been no words for generals, troops, or cannons
In the society of San people there has been little need for mathematics, since they have had neither cattle nor money, nor anything else that has to be counted. This is reflected in the language, which lacks inherited words for plus or minus, and is by no means rich in numerals.There seem to be no special words in Ju|’hoan for numbers higher than 6.
There is another reason why one finds fewer words and expressions in Khoisan languages than in English and in other European languages: there is no written language. For this reason the language, including all the words, can be transferred from one generation to the next only through the children’s learning to understand and speak it.
This may be of great importance, especially for a language that is used by relatively few people. A word denoting something that is not frequently spoken about may not be learnt by all people, but only by some. If there are no more than a few thousand, or even a few hundred speakers, the risk that an uncommon word will not be transmitted at all can be considerable, and in that case it is irretrievably lost. When someone needs to talk about this again it will be necessary to use a circumlocution of some kind, or to invent a new word. How much this type of vocabulary loss happens in practice cannot be known, as it is hardly possible to study the process directly. But there is considerable evidence that people who use written language get support from it, so that their vocabulary is richer also when they talk.
A language without a written form also runs a considerable risk of losing poems and other linguistic artifacts. It is not that literature cannot exist without writing. There are abundant examples of poems transmitted orally, including very long epic tales. But this requires that at least a few people in each generation can devote themselves to the task of memorizing and performing the material. In a small group of speakers, this may not happen, and in that case, words and expressions are not transmitted to later generations by way of extensive literary works.
In summary, languages of gatherers and hunters are just like European languages in terms of their fundamental properties and capacity for expression, but this capacity is not used in the same way.As their languages are not used in the same situations as ours are, their resources for expression are also different. They possess all the words and expressions that are needed by the societies in which they are used, including much that is not found in European languages, but much is lacking that seems quite basic to us.
Clearly,this has nothing to do with the structure or the potential of the languages, but only with what they are used for. At present the Ju|’hoan speakers are creating or borrowing many words denoting things and concepts of the modern world.In that way they adapt their language to a new situation. This is perfectly possible, and there is no theoretical reason why Ju|’hoan could not in the future be used for discussions about polymer chemistry or computer design. In the same way, speakers of English could adapt their language to allow for discussions about plants and hunting in the Kalahari. However, the process of building a vocabulary is slow and laborious. Therefore, users of Ju|’hoan will be at a disadvantage in many urban contexts for a long time. English will hardly ever be adapted to the situation in the desert.
How Many Khoisan Languages are There?
The Khoisan languages, spoken by the San peoples, are fairly numerous. It is by no means an easy matter to find out how many they are or what they are called. A person who starts studying what has been written about these languages is liable to get confused very soon. Everyone who tries to describe the situation offers a large number of language names,most of them spelt in remarkable ways.
These strange spellings are partly but not completely explained by the difficulty of rendering the click sounds in writing. Clicks are sounds formed by creating low pressure in the mouth and then letting the air in abruptly. Such sounds are often used for special purposes in other parts of the world. By speakers of English, for example, it is not unusual to signal disapproval or disbelief through a sound that is often transcribed “tut” or “tut-tut.”This is in fact the sound called a dental click in Khoisan languages. But there, it is used within words as an ordinary consonant, and there are also other clicks that sound different. To denote these sounds in writing, different systems can be used. Usually, linguists employ the symbols | and ! and ≠ and ⋅
One of the important scholars within the field of Khoisan languages, Dorothea Bleek from Germany, reported in the 1950s that there are about twenty different languages, with names such as |Xam, Khomani, ||K’au||en, and !KuN.Almost no other author uses exactly those names.Instead of the last one,one may find for example !Xu,!Khung,Kung, and !Kung.
This would only be a minor problem if it were just a matter of differences in spelling. But for several decades almost all scholars who have been working with Khoisan languages have also added one or several names of languages or dialects. In 1981, an energetic scholar published a list of most of the names of Khoisan languages that had been used up to that time in the scholarly literature. The list includes a total of 141 items, disregarding minor variations in spelling. Since that time, a few more have been proposed.
There is probably no one who believes that there are as many different languages as that among 70,000 speakers or thereabouts. The typical situation is that there are many names for what most people agree is actually one language. Just as an example, for a language which is often called Shuakhwe,the following names have also been used, among others: ||ɅAyè, Danisa, ||Koreekhoe, |Xaise, Tçaiti, Hura, Teti,!Hukwe.
There are several reasons why the list of names has become so long. Several names refer to languages and groups that no longer exist.Many people who spoke Khoisan languages lived in the southern and eastern parts of South Africa. They were persecuted in atrocious ways, and in some cases actual genocide was committed. The remnants of those peoples gave up their languages and started using a form of Afrikaans. The Khoisan languages in South Africa are now extinct. About forty of the names refer to them.
Still,there are just too many remaining names.To understand why this is so we have to discuss the languages themselves and their relation to each other.
“What Language do you Speak?”
“Don’t Know.”
Linguistic studies of Khoisan languages have shown that the group consists of three very dissimilar subgroups. As a matter of fact, they are so different that it is not even certain that they are related. The three families are Northern Khoisan, Central Khoisan, and Southern Khoisan. The Southern Khoisan group nowadays comprises only one language. It would therefore seem quite easy to tell the name of that language, but it is not.
Here, we meet the real problem concerning language names. It turns out that the speakers themselves, when asked about the name of their language, do not produce an unambiguous answer. This is not because they are slow on the uptake or because of communication problems. The reason is simply that no answer is to be had. This language just does not have a name in the language. That this is so has been established without doubt by Anthony Trail, one of the few scholars who has learnt a Khoisan language thoroughly and is able to speak it.
We may be somewhat slow in absorbing this fact. At any rate, the scholars, missionaries, and others who have been in touch with these languages have not understood it for a long time. This may be the most important reason why one finds such an excessive number of names in the literature. Each eager explorer has asked the people what language they speak. The persons asked have tried to formulate a suitable answer, which has been conscientiously written down by the scholar. The next scholar has met some other speaker, who has produced some other polite answer, and that too has been recorded for posterity. In that way the number of reported Khoisan languages has constantly grown larger, from the mid-nineteenth century until a decade or two ago.
Several questions may be asked about this. The first one is what kind of names scholars have actually recorded. It turns out that most of them belong to one of three types. First, there are words that denote a larger group to which the speaker belongs. Those are the most stable names, which tend to recur in many variants, and they mean at least partly the same as our language names. But even if a person regards herself or himself as belonging to a group that has a name, this does not necessarily mean that all people who talk the same language belong to that group. There may be others who talk in the same way but do not belong to the group. Also, it is quite possible for people who talk in slightly different ways, or even in very different ways, to regard themselves as belonging to one group with one name.
The second type of name denotes the area where the speakers live, or the family or small group to which the speaker belongs. That is as if English was called the Luton language or the Smith language. Such designations tend to lengthen the list of existing names in a very confusing way.
The third type of name is represented by such as Kwe, Khoe, Shuakhwe, ||Anikhwe, and also by the term Khoisan, which has been fabricated by Europeans from words taken from the languages.All these words consist of or contain the same word stem khwe or khwi, which consists of two sounds, an aspirated ksound which is pronounced with rounded lips,and a front vowel, e or i. The word means “human being” or “people.” The people who have been asked have answered that they speak the language of humans, or that they speak as people do.
The next question is how it is possible that people have not got a name for the language they speak. To us, it seems self-evident that a person must know which language she or he is speaking. But if one thinks of the environment in which those languages have been used, the explanation is quite obvious.The San people have lived in small groups of ten or twenty people, and each group has been out of contact with other groups during most of the year. During some periods they have met other people, both for trade and for other common activities.But there has not been any state, or union, or other common institution causing the people who talk in a similar way to regard themselves as a separate unit or group. The groups that people have felt they belong to have mostly been much smaller than any imagined group of all people speaking the same language. In such a situation, the language has no particular importance for a person’s identity or status, and therefore does not have to have a name of its own.
Finally, one may ask what should be done by outside observers when the speakers themselves do not provide us with a name for their language. The answer is of course that nothing prevents us from introducing one. That is precisely what linguists have done. When it comes to the Southern Khoisan language I have discussed, most linguists agree now that it should be called !Xóõ.
So far, the matter is not very difficult, since this southern language is fairly homogeneous, without any major dialectal differences, and it is clearly different from all other languages.The northern group, on the other hand, consists of one or two or three languages, depending on whether one regards differences between speakers as dialectal differences or differences in language. As for the Central Khoisan languages, the situation is even less clear. It is a certain fact that there are a number of languages that are not at all mutually intelligible. On the other hand, all the languages are related, and some are quite similar. In several cases it is not obvious whether it is better to talk about different dialects or about different languages.
What is a Language?
At this point we again encounter the question of what a language is. It reappears time and again in this book. As a preliminary, it should be said that there are few generally accepted rules or criteria for deciding when two ways of speaking should be regarded as being the same language and when they should be seen as two separate ones.
Obviously, when two forms of speech are so dissimilar that it is completely impossible to establish communication, as is the case with English and Chinese, for example, they are regarded as different languages by everyone. Further, people who understand each other are usually regarded as speaking the same language, and those who speak the same language are supposed to understand each other. But here, there are many exceptions. For example, Swedes and Norwegians usually understand each other without difficulty, but Swedish and Norwegian are regarded as different languages. On the other hand, many Americans from the Midwest do not understand Londoners, and vice versa, but they are supposed to be using the same English language. This is why it is necessary to rely on the speakers themselves in dubious cases.
When it comes to the Khoisan languages, it is not possible to ask. The speakers in some cases have no names at all for their languages, nor of course for dialects. So, this whole line of reasoning is without meaning for them until the Westernized way of thinking about languages has been taken over into their culture. This has not happened yet, at least not generally. For this reason there is simply no answer to the question of how many Khoisan languages there are. Within certain limits, there are as many languages as scholars and state authorities decide.
How many Languages Existed Twelve Thousand Years ago?
Even if we cannot tell precisely whether there are ten or fifteen or perhaps twenty Khoisan languages, it is still clear that there are many quite different languages. It is remarkable for people who are accustomed to the situation in Europe, not to mention America, that a group as small as 70,000 people uses so many different languages. In Europe, the large languages are spoken by tens of millions of people and the whole of Western Europe with several hundred million speakers only has about fifty languages (not counting languages spoken by immigrants who have arrived during the last generation).
It should be noted in passing that the phrase “large languages” in the previous sentence is just a shorter way of saying “languages used by many persons.” Similarly, “small languages” are languages used by few. For the sake of convenience those phrases and their counterparts in the singular are used freely in this book. Of course they do not imply any judgement of value.
The fact that there is such a difference in the number of speakers is of course no coincidence. It is directly related to the great differences between Europeans and San people in culture and lifestyle, and also in the way they use languages.
The San people, who live (or have lived) on what they can get from hunting and gathering fruits and edible roots, need large areas to provide themselves with food. Even in a relatively fertile area, a square kilometer of land can support only a few people. In the Kalahari Desert, where the San people live, even more space is needed. This means that each group needs a large area, and has to move over it systematically.They cannot live close to other people. There are not many reasons to get in touch with people other than those belonging to neighboring groups. Thus, each group is comparatively isolated.
Each group of course uses a language. It is a well-known fact that languages are never transmitted in exactly the same shape from generation to generation; they change over time. If a group of people has few contacts with others speaking its language, a separate speech form will soon appear. This is what we call a dialect. If this process is allowed to run its course for a few centuries, the group may develop a language that is incomprehensible to all other people.
This should mean that in times and places where people constantly live in small groups without contacts, far from each other, there will appear many languages with few speakers.This seems to be true for the situation among San people. The next question is whether this was also so at the time when all people on earth were gatherers and hunters.
Actually, the known facts indicate strongly that this was the case. For in other parts of the world where there have recently been sizeable populations of gatherers and hunters, the situation is quite similar. The aborigines of Australia are thought to have spoken about 270 languages when the Europeans arrived. They are now only about fifty thousand people. It is true that they were much more numerous two hundred years ago, when the Europeans started occupying their land,but even if they were ten times as many,there were still no more than a couple of thousand speakers for each language, on average. Among Indians in the Amazon region, the situation is similar. There are no indications anywhere that gatherers and hunters usually have languages that are spoken by more than a few thousand people.
If this is correct, it means that we can say something about how many languages existed in the world at the time when all people were hunters and gatherers, 12,000 years ago or thereabouts. According to the discussion above, one has to conclude that at that time there was about one language for every thousand or two thousand people.
The next question, of course, is how many people there were. We do not know that. On the other hand we know that there were human beings on all continents in most of the areas that are densely populated now.There cannot possibly have been just a few thousand people altogether; the number has to be in the millions. Just to take an example, if there were ten million people, and 2,000 persons to each language, there would have been 5,000 languages.
There is probably no way to find out what the correct population figure is, although archaeologists and demographers have made certain calculations. But it is interesting to compare the example with the number of languages found nowadays. According to most estimates, the figure is around 6,000, or at least of that order of magnitude.
This means that there may actually have been as many languages on earth at the time of gatherers and hunters as are found today, even though the population at that period was not much larger than 10,000,000, that is only about two-tenths of 1 per cent of the present population of more than five billion people.
These figures should not be taken very seriously, as they are based on a number of premises, which are far from certain. But there is hardly any doubt about the general trend. In early times there were lots of languages, very many more than now in relative terms, and perhaps more than now even in absolute numbers. The history of languages by no means entails that the number of languages increases. On the contrary, the general trend is certainly that the number of languages has fallen, at least relatively speaking. This is quite important to our understanding of the role of languages and of linguistic differences. Several chapters in this book take that observation as their starting-point.
The next chapter, however, is about language groups. Why is it that some languages are similar, and others are not?
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