Linguistics Discussion 2013 and Beyond discussion

Hello. Can you tell me the way languages become exist. I want to know the way produce new words of languages from the very beginning. Thank you. (Sorry because of my hard English, I'm improving it, I think you can understand what I mean.)

Welcome! No apologies necessary for struggling with English. Learning a new language is difficult, and takes a lot of work. If you can practice here, with us, then I'm glad we can help!


As to your question: that's actually a pretty provocative, difficult, and kind of loaded question to try and answer. I'm certainly no expert, but I'll try my best. It's sounds like you're asking about either how new languages form, or the origin of language itself, often called the "first language." We don't really know the first language(s), or exactly how they/it formed, which is why we have mythological stories like the Tower of Babel.

The best we can do is think about it from what we know of human evolution, and small isolated examples we can study today. The thing about Language, is that it's really all in the brain. The languages we work with today (like Vietnamese or English), are really just manifestations of what are are brain is doing; they simply reflect different ways of organizing the same information.

So human language likely developed gradually, as the human brain (and hence, capacity for language) evolved over time.

The rare examples we have today of people growing up without learning a language properly (like criminally neglected/abused children) typically result in that child having major mental deficiencies and learning disorders. Because they aren't exposed to language properly, their brains don't develop properly. So really, language itself is how we organize information in our brain. Without language, we literally have trouble making sense of the world.


The other way to answer your question is if you are talking about how new languages form, and the best answer is that they form gradually, over time, until people generally accept it as a new language. This is mostly what historical linguists study.

I don't know the ancestor language of Vietnamese, but allow me to use languages I'm more familiar with as an example. Take for instance, Latin. Latin is the direct ancestor language to all the "Romance" languages (like Italian, French, Spanish, and Romanian). Now, these languages became distinct languages themselves over time, based on regional dialects within the Roman Empire (which used Latin). When the Roman Empire fell, and Latin was no longer standardized throughout the land, the regional dialects became more isolated from each other, and started changing directions from each other. A word for one thing in one town, is called another thing in a town hundreds of miles away. Possibly for a lot of reasons, but often from the influence of other neighboring languages. So Romanian adopts words from the languages to the east of it, while French adopts words from the "barbarians" to the north and East. Eventually you have them growing apart from each other until their speakers can't understand each other, in which case they are a new language. Dialects exists within major languages, and those dialects are either growing apart, or growing closer together. They are either becoming more similar, or more different, over time.

How different does somebody from Hanoi sound from another person in Ho Chi Minh City? If there was no contact between the north and south of Vietnam over a long enough period of time, it's likely that we would eventually call them two different languages.


Sorry for writing so much, and I hope I didn't ramble. Thank you for the discussion question. It is an interesting thing to think about.

Thank you for interesting answer, I love this topic. I have many problems on linguistic want to know and you helped me something. Thank you.

Thế Chiến wrote: "Hello. Can you tell me the way languages become exist. I want to know the way produce new words of languages from the very beginning. Thank you. (Sorry because of my hard English, I'm improving it,..."

While I loved Kyle's answer, another way to look at it is that language comes into existence the way any other shared social practice does. How does any cultural tradition come into being? People invent the social tools they need to live together. In places where it gets cold and dark in the winter, they create customs that promote lots of people all crowding into the same room and sharing food and warmth together. When people need to communicate with each other (an apparently universal need), they create languages. My guess is that it's done by consensus, and is built up from a framework of body language, gestures, and the kinds of preverbal noises that everyone makes instinctively (screaming or squalling for pain or fear; gasping for surprise; a kind of mini-retch for disgust...), plus a fair amount of imitation of the noises made by the world around you-- hence onomatopoeia. I can totally imagine, for example, that two people with no common or formalized verbal language could have a rudimentary but adequate forensic discussion: Person A gasps and points to a body, and Person B points to the gaping wound on the person's neck and imitates the cry of a jaguar; maybe makes a gesture with their hand to imitate the biting of its jaws or the beast dropping from a tree onto its prey. If A and B spend enough time together, maybe Person A consistently makes a sort of noise to get Person B's attention when they come across a similar situation, and Person B adopts it. Together they have created a word that means something like "hey!" or "look!", and, because their brains are marvels of flexibility, they feel free to utilize this word to mean "look!" in lots of varying situations that demand the other's attention. It becomes helpful to them by virtue of its non-specificity. Person B in turn, maybe gets sick of imitating a jaguar snarl all the time, and maybe abbreviates it somehow, or uses just the dropping-from-a-tree hand gesture, and only ever uses that gesture to mean "jaguar". If Person A attempts to use the gesture to represent some OTHER animal --a snake that drops down from trees also, perhaps-- Person B gets frustrated and corrects them (maybe scowls to show displeasure?), because it's more useful for that gesture/sound to mean just one, specific thing rather than to represent a whole category of animals-that-are-dangerous-to-humans-and-live-in-trees. Person A, desiring to maintain goodwill and good communication, thus uses the word only in that specific way. Et voila! Together they have created a language!

Now, as a disclaimer, I am TOTALLY MAKING THIS ALL UP, based purely on having done a linguistics/language acquisition minor in college way back in the '00s, and also having spent a lot of my life hanging out with babies and people with whom I don't share a common language. But I like it just fine as a theory, and hopefully you will enjoy it as well, and maybe it will get you thinking in an interesting direction. :D

Thank you for that, Megan! I suppose my original response missed this aspect of language creation and was more focused on language drift; thanks for bringing this mode of language creation up, which is like how pidgins and creoles are made.

Pidginization occurs when two peoples have a necessity of communication (like traders), yet speak drastically different languages. A communication system grows out of necessity, then once babies are born and raised with this pidgin they apply their Chomskyan universal grammar to it, thereby creating a full fledged language. Good stuff!

Thank you. I don't understand every word but I'll do a research about it. Thanks for your reply.

I'm going to jump in and say I believe that language, from any research I've done, appears to be a cumulative thing. In that not one thing can be responsible for its creation but that many things are responsible for how new languages are developed or die. I think it is easier to work out why languages die (death of speakers or no need for it in a globalised world).

It seems apparent that there are places in the brain responsible for language development. How that got there is up for debate depending on what side of science you take. Either way that on its own must mix with social stimuli in order to help you develop ways of communication with words.

As I wrote on one of the other threads there are ideas about language being context for culture, culture being the context for language and so on. We create language but language is also created by what social situations we choose to live in!

Thế Chiến wrote: "Thank you. I don't understand every word but I'll do a research about it. Thanks for your reply."

Well, I know I love talking about words (and probably a lot of other people here do, too), so please feel free to ask about words or phrases that don't make sense!

And thank you for the fun question! :D

There're some words I don't know for example "consensus", "pidgin" and "creole". Do you know which way is the best way to learn a language? I wish there's some one help me learning English because I like it and I need it very much.
About the type of language and the sound of words in a language people speak, does it have any relation to the construction of the people body for example ADN and the environment that people lived in? And I have word problems I need your help and I hope you can help me fix it. I want to speak more naturally but I feel hard to say sometimes.
Thank you for your answer.

Thế Chiến wrote: "There're some words I don't know for example "consensus", "pidgin" and "creole". Do you know which way is the best way to learn a language? I wish there's some one help me learning English because ..."

See, this is the kind of thing I love! Here's how I define and use these words (and of course others may chime in with different uses):

-consensus is what happens when a group of people all come to agreement on something. Sometimes it's formal, like they actually take a vote. For example, maybe a bunch of students are renting a house together, and they meet monthly to set a schedule for doing chores. One person proposes to the group that a new chore be added to the list, and they take a vote. If everybody votes "yes", that the new chore is worth adding, then they have consensus. If somebody disagrees, says "No, that's stupid", then they don't have consensus, because they don't all agree. But consensus can also refer to more informal agreement, like if a group of friends clearly all feel the same way about something, even if there hasn't been an actual vote on anything. Similar words/phrases are "in agreement" or "all in accord" or "of the same mind". The verb "to consent" shares a similar root with consensus, but is usually used a little bit differently. "To consent" means "to agree" to something, but is almost always used in a very formal way, like when talking about whether someone "gave consent" to sexual intercourse (because if they didn't then it was, legally speaking, rape.)

Oops! I have to go run some errands, but I will continue with the other words later!

Thank you.

Thế Chiến wrote: "Hello. Can you tell me the way languages become exist. I want to know the way produce new words of languages from the very beginning. Thank you. (Sorry because of my hard English, I'm improving it,..."

I have just finished Guy Deutscher's "The Unfolding of Language" which goes into a lot of (fairly speculative) detail on your question.

The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

Most linguists know Latin so concentrate on inheritance from that. He also knows Sanskrit so moves the process back about 1500 years further (all pre-writing, so nobody really knows for sure). He also knows Hittite, so has a lot to say about the inheritance into different Semitic languages.

I know that your own language has none of these roots, but quite a few people who have been teaching English to Japanese and Koreans, say that they wished they had read his book first.

Megan wrote: "Thế Chiến wrote: "There're some words I don't know for example "consensus", "pidgin" and "creole". Do you know which way is the best way to learn a language? I wish there's some one help me learnin..."

I'll agree with your definition on consensus.