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2. What is Language?

3. What is Language?
• Language, a system of conventional spoken,
manual (signed), or written symbols by means
of which human beings, as members of a
social group and participants in its culture,
express themselves.

4. Introduction
• No one knows exactly when or how human
beings came up with spoken language.
• One hypothesis is that language began between
• 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, with the advent of
modern man, i.e. homo sapiens.
• This is well before the invention of the written
• language, about 5,000 years ago. We have direct
evidence and artifacts about writing.

5. The Origins of Language
 There are Speculations about how language
may have originated.
 Suspect that some type of spoken language
must have developed between 100,000 and
50,000 years ago, well before written language
(about 5,000 years ago).
 Absence of direct physical evidence.

6. Theories of Language Origin
• The Divine Source
• The Natural Sound Source
(a)The “Bow-Wow” Theory
(b)The “Pooh-Pooh” Theory
• The Social Interaction Source
• The Physical Adaptation Source
Teeth and Lips Mouth and Tongue Larynx and
Pharynx
• The Tool-Making Source (The Human Brain)
• The Genetic Source (The Innateness Hypothesis)

7. The Divine Source
• In most religions, there appears to be a divine source
who provides humans with language.
• Genesis 2/19: God created Adam and “whatsoever
• Adam called every living creature, was the name
thereof.”
• The Qur’an: He said, “O Adam, inform them of their
• names.” And when he had informed them of their
names… (Al Baqarah, 2/31-33)
• A Hindu belief: language came from Saraswati, wife
• of Brahma, creator of the universe.

8. The Divine Source
• The basic hypothesis seems to have been that, if
human infants were allowed to grow up without
hearing any language around them, then they would
spontaneously begin using the original God-given
language.
• Attempts to find a divine, God-given language
• Psamtik carried out an experiment with two babies
depriving them of human contact. They uttered the
word bekos ‘bread’ in Phrygian!!
• King James the Fourth did a similar experiment and
the kids were reported to speak Hebrew.

9. Negation of Divine Source
• The Mogul emperor Akbar the Great also
arranged for newborn babies to be raised in
silence, only to find that the children produced
no speech at mall.
• It is unfortunate that Akbar’s result is more in line
with the real-world outcome for children who
have been discovered living in isolation, without
coming into contact with human speech. ( The
Study of Language, 6th edition, pg, 27)

10. The Natural Sound Source
• Language emerged from natural sounds.
• Primitive words are considered to be imitations of
• natural sounds that people hear around them.
• Jespersen (1922) called this idea the “bow-wow”
theory.
• The natural sound a bird makes is argued to have
been used to describe that particular animal.
• The fact that in many languages there are words such
• as drip, click, meow and honk that sound like what
they mean supports this claim.
• Not every sound is onomatopoeic in languages!!

11. (i)The “Bow-Wow” Theory
• different objects flew by, making a C AW - C AW
or C O O - C O O sound, the early human tried to
imitate the sounds and then used them to refer
to those objects even when they weren’t present.
• The fact that all modern languages have some
words with pronunciations that seem to echo
naturally occurring sounds could be used to support
this theory.
In English, in addition to cuckoo, we have splash,
bang, boom, rattle, buzz, hiss, screech and of course
bow-wow.

12. Th Bow-Wow Theory
• Words that sound similar to the noises they
describe are examples of onomatopeia.

13. (ii)The “Pooh-Pooh” Theory
• Jespersen’s nicknames was the “pooh-pooh”
theory, which proposed that speech developed
from the instinctive sounds people make in
emotional circumstances.
• original sounds of language may have come from
natural cries of emotion such as pain,
• anger and joy. Ouch! came to have its painful
connotations. But
• Ouch! and other interjections such as Ah!, Ooh!,
Phew!, Wow! or Yuck

14. The Social Interaction Source
• involving natural sounds was nicknamed the “yo-
he-ho” theory. The idea
• is that the sounds of a person involved in physical
effort could be the source of our language,
especially when that physical effort involved
several people and the interaction had to be
coordinated.
• group of early humans might develop a set of
hums, grunts, groans and curses that were used
when they were lifting and carrying large bits of
trees

15. The Social Interaction Source
• The appeal of this proposal is that it places the
development of human language in a social
context.

16. The Physical Adaptation Source

17. The Physical Adaptation Source
• Human beings are genetically with some physical
features that are responsible of producing speech
sounds.
• types of physical features humans possess,
especially those that may have supported speech
production.
• such features would not guarantee speech, but
they are good clues that a creature with such
features probably has the capacity for speech.
• Teeth, lips, Mouth, Tongue, Larynx, Pharynx

18. The Tool-Making Source
• Tool making, or the outcome of manipulating objects and
changing them using both hands, is evidence of a brain at
work.
• The human brain is not only large relative to human body
size, it is also lateralized, that is,
• it has specialized functions in each of the two hemispheres.
• The patterns of blood flow to specific parts of the brain
were very similar, suggesting that aspects of the structure of
language may have developed through the same brain circuits
established earlier for two-handed stone tool creation.

19. The Genetic Source (The innateness
hypothesis)
• Human offspring are born with a special
• capacity for language.
• It is innate, no other creature seems to have it
and it is not tied to a specific variety of
language.

20. Conclusion
• consider this hypothesis, we find our speculations
about the origins of language moving away from
fossil evidence or the physical source of basic
human sounds toward analogies with how
computers work (e.g. being preprogrammed
or hard-wired) and concepts taken from the study
of biology and genetics.
• The investigation of the origins of language then
turns into a search for the special
• “language gene” that only humans possess.

21. Reference
• Yule.G,. 6th Edition, 2006. pg, 25.40