Five Theories on the Origins of Language
It's hard to imagine a cultural phenomenon that's more important than the development of
language. And yet no human attribute offers less conclusive evidence regarding its origins. The
mystery, says Christine Kenneally in her book The First Word, lies in the nature of the spoken
word:
"For all its power to wound and seduce, speech is our most ephemeral creation; it is
little more than air. It exits the body as a series of puffs and dissipates quickly into the
atmosphere... There are no verbs preserved in amber, no ossified nouns, and no
prehistorical shrieks forever spread-eagled in the lava that took them by surprise."
The absence of such evidence certainly hasn't discouraged speculation about the origins of
language. Over the centuries, many theories have been put forward—and just about all of them
have been challenged, discounted, and often ridiculed. Each theory accounts for only a small part
of what we know about language.
Here, identified by their disparaging nicknames, are five of the oldest and most common theories
of how language began.
The Bow-Wow 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.
What's wrong with this theory?
Relatively few words are onomatopoeic, and these words vary from one language to another. For
instance, a dog's bark is heard as au au in Brazil, ham ham in Albania, and wang, wang in China.
In addition, many onomatopoeic words are of recent origin, and not all are derived from natural
sounds.
The Ding-Dong Theory
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.
What's wrong with this theory?
Apart from some rare instances of sound symbolism, there's no persuasive evidence, in any
language, of an innate connection between sound and meaning.
The La-La Theory
The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen suggested that language may have developed from sounds
associated with love, play, and (especially) song.
What's wrong with this theory?
As David Crystal notes in How Language Works (Penguin, 2005), this theory still fails to
account for "the gap between the emotional and the rational aspects of speech expression."
The Pooh-Pooh Theory
This theory holds that speech began with interjections—spontaneous cries of pain ("Ouch!"),
surprise ("Oh!"), and other emotions ("Yabba dabba do!").
What's wrong with this theory?
No language contains very many interjections, and, Crystal points out, "the clicks, intakes of
breath, and other noises which are used in this way bear little relationship to the vowels and
consonants found in phonology."
The Yo-He-Ho Theory
According to this theory, language evolved from the grunts, groans, and snorts evoked by heavy
physical labor.
What's wrong with this theory?
Though this notion may account for some of the rhythmic features of the language, it doesn't go
very far in explaining where words come from.
As Peter Farb says in Word Play: What Happens When People Talk (Vintage, 1993):
"All these speculations have serious flaws, and none can withstand the close scrutiny of
present knowledge about the structure of language and about the evolution of our
species."
But does this mean that all questions about the origin of language are unanswerable?
Not necessarily. Over the past 20 years, scholars from such diverse fields as genetics,
anthropology, and cognitive science have been engaged, as Kenneally says, in "a cross-
discipline, multidimensional treasure hunt" to find out how language began. It is, she
says, "the hardest problem in science today."
In a future article, we'll consider more recent theories about the origins and
development of language—what William James called "the most imperfect and
expensive means yet discovered for communicating a thought."
