Who was the first speaker?
How humans began to speak is a question that has intrigued humanity for millennia. Between biblical accounts and the myths of different cultures, each people explains the origin of language and the diversity of languages in its own way. Meanwhile, linguists continue to investigate it.
PalmAs is well known, children often ask adults difficult questions. One I've been asked more than once is: Who was the first person to speak? Or a variation of it: How did people begin to speak? It's a question that has intrigued humanity for millennia.
Numerous cultures around our spherical planet have tried to explain the origin of language and the diversity of languages through myths that directly link speech to the origin of humanity and to divine intervention. The biblical tradition is well known, according to which language arises with humankind: Adam names the beings of Paradise, thus creating the first words. Linguistic diversity is explained in Genesis through the punishment of the Tower of Babel, when God confuses the languages of men as a response to their pride in trying to reach heaven.
Parallel Myths
This myth finds curious parallels in other traditions. In Irish folklore, the legendary Phoenix king Farsaid, supposed creator of the Ogham alphabet, is said to have participated in the construction of the Tower of Babel. Medieval texts such as the Lebor GabálaÉrenn ol'Auraicept na n-Éces He is presented as the discoverer of several alphabets, and Ogham is considered the most perfect because it was the last to be created.
The ancient Greeks also believed in a single, original language, granted by primordial deities, and attributed the creation of new languages to Hermes, which would explain the division of humanity. Furthermore, Hermes was associated with both communication and the interpretation of meaning, the origin of the term 'hermeneutics'. In Norse mythology, the faculty of speech is one of the divine gifts bestowed upon the first humans, while in Hindu tradition, the goddess Vach personifies speech and knowledge.
In India, Africa, and Polynesia, various peoples explain the multiplicity of languages as a consequence of divine punishments, natural disasters, famines, or human attempts to reach heaven by means of towers or pagodas. In many African and American cultures, the idea of a single, original language that fragmented after a forced dispersal of humanity is repeated. Among the Amerindian peoples, the original inhabitants of the Americas, myths attribute linguistic diversity to floods, migrations guided by the gods, social conflicts, or even trivial disputes. In all cases, language appears as an essentially human trait, closely linked to the social and cosmic order. These narratives show that, despite geographical and cultural distance, societies have resorted to surprisingly similar explanations to understand the origin of language and its diversity. All of this makes us realize that the question the child asks is a very important one, and also a very difficult one to answer. Some linguists, specializing in the evolution of language and languages, have spent many years searching for ways to deduce and discover how language arose. One might think that it arose for communication, but if we look closely, animals communicate, plants communicate, and they don't use a language like ours, with such sophisticated languages and such complex sentences. Indeed, this area of science has led linguists to study the different systems of animal communication and compare them, trying to figure out what is common and what is particular to each species. It is an area of linguistics with a very high degree of interdisciplinarity, and you will find linguists who read about biology, about the fauna of our planet. For example, a key work is that of Karl von Frisch when, in 1967, he managed to decipher how bees communicate. It turns out that, in the abstract, the bee system has patterns similar to how humans encode meaning in morphemes and words. But they don't make sentences like ours, with transitive and intransitive verbs (which so excite young people in high school), with declensions or prepositions. This aspect is much harder to find in nature.
Generational Songs
In the 19th century, Charles Darwin, in his book The Descent of ManHe observed that many bird species have the ability to produce wonderful songs, and that they pass them on to the next generation. The Japanese scientist Kazuo Okanoya has spent decades studying how a particular bird, the white-headed manakin, communicates.Lonchura striataand has found many similarities with human phonology. But in certain species, the development of this ability must occur when the chicks are young, because if it is delayed too long, the same thing happens as with humans and language: the opportunity to develop that ability can be missed. This is called the 'critical period': once it has passed, the individual cannot properly develop (or not at all) a given ability.
It is worth mentioning the songs of whales, marvelous animals that demonstrate an extraordinary communicative capacity. Their songs have been analyzed, and it has been found that they contain a much more complex structure than initially thought. Despite suspicions, the meaning of the units in the songs has not yet been deciphered.
Humans use language so many times a day and in so many different situations that we are sometimes unaware of the wonder that this cognitive ability represents. Six million years ago, the ancestors of chimpanzees and humans diverged, and the result, in terms of oral communication, has been language in the case of humans—a capacity that no chimpanzee has ever been able to develop, not even those raised among humans from birth. But how did it all begin? At what point in human evolution did language appear? The mystery remains unsolved, but linguists aren't giving up; quite the opposite!
