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What is the origin of language?
How long ago did language originate?
Did language originate only once?
Do we know how language began?
Atkinson's "best fit" model is that language originated in western, central, or southern Africa between 80,000 and 160,000 years ago. This predates the hypothesized southern coastal peopling of Arabia, India, southeast Asia, and Australia. It would also mean that the origin of language occurred at the same time as the emergence of symbolic culture.
- The Bow-Wow Theory
- The Ding-Dong Theory
- The La-La Theory
- The Pooh-Pooh Theory
- The Yo-He-Ho Theory
According to this theory, language began when our ancestors started imitating the natural sounds around them. The first speech was onomatopoeic—marked by echoic words such as moo, meow, splash, cuckoo, and bang.
This theory, favored by Plato and Pythagoras, maintains that speech arose in response to the essential qualities of objects in the environment. The original sounds people made were supposedly in harmony with the world around them.
The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen suggested that language may have developed from sounds associated with love, play, and (especially) song.
This theory holds that speech began with interjections—spontaneous cries of pain ("Ouch!"), surprise ("Oh!"), and other emotions ("Yabba dabba do!").
According to this theory, language evolved from the grunts, groans, and snorts evoked by heavy physical labor.
Feb 3, 2016 · To those of us who study human evolution, this incredible universality suggests that our species has had language right from when Homo sapiens arose in Africa between 200,000 and 160,000 years...
- Mark Pagel
Apr 16, 2011 · A recent study conducted by Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, suggests two very important findings: language originated only once, and the specific place of origin may be southwestern Africa.
Sep 1, 2018 · The three systems run at entirely different timescales, but when they interlock, something extraordinary happens: language is born. In the short time since the field of language evolution has...
Apr 26, 2018 · By. Richard Nordquist. Updated on April 26, 2018. The expression language origins refers to theories pertaining to the emergence and development of language in human societies. Over the centuries, many theories have been put forward—and almost all of them have been challenged, discounted, and ridiculed.
