Perro, chien, hund, sobaka, kelev, mbwa, animush, inu. No, those aren’t the ingredients for tonight’s special at a vegetarian restaurant–at least, one hopes not: they’re all words for the creature we who speak English would call a dog. At first glance, the languages from which those words come would seem to have little in common with each other–but linguists will tell you that, in reality, all human languages are remarkably similar; not in their specific vocabulary, but in the way they are organized.
Modern human language has existed roughly as long as modern homo sapiens–maybe 40,000 years. Before that, the Neanderthals probably had some form of language, but since the latest DNA evidence has shown pretty conclusively that Neanderthals aren’t our direct ancestors, that doesn’t count. Linguists continue to debate whether early humans developed a single language from which today’s thousands (I saw numbers ranging from 3,000 to 8,000) developed, or whether several different languages sprang up in various places around the world, all at once. Suffice it to say that language and the whole process of using tools and cooperating with each other to accomplish things–the process that eventually led to human-build robots on Mars and other great achievements like the Big Valley Jamboree–developed together.
Human language is unique among the various forms of animal communication. Although other primates have been taught to use American Sign Language, their own native forms of communication don’t begin to approach the complexity and usefulness of human language. Unlike animals, humans string together discrete units of grammar to form an infinite set of original sentences–sentences never before thought, spoken or heard. And amazingly, this ability to use language appears to be innate: infants who haven’t been taught grammar form their own rules of language just by trying to talk and gathering input from the humans around them.
There are three essential elements to human language: physiology, grammar and semantics.
Most of the organs we use for speaking originally evolved to perform other useful functions such as breathing and eating; nevertheless, they also give us the most efficient communication system in the animal kingdom. To speak, we exhale air, vibrating it on our vocal chords and shaping it with our tongue, the soft palate and the lips. Teeth and the nasal cavity come into play, as well.
Grammar is the structure by which units of sound are combined to produce meaning. The smallest unit of sound that has meaning in a language is called a morpheme. In English, some morphemes are words in and of themselves (“a,” for instance) or may join together to create words (“amoral”–“a” and “moral” are two separate morphemes). Words form phrases, which eventually form sentences.
Finally, we have to attach meaning to the sounds we’re making; that’s semantics. One of the by-products of the flexibility of human language is that sometimes the meaning attached by a speaker to what he or she is saying is not the meaning that the listener attaches to the same set of sounds…something politicians run into (an occasionally take advantage of) all the time.
Languages can be classified in a variety of ways. One way is by the way words are formed. Using this method, languages are called analytical, agglutinative, inflectional and incorporating. Analytical languages, such as Chinese, have words of one syllable with no added parts. Agglutinative language use basic parts and attach prefixes, suffixes or infixes before, after or in the middle of the basic part, respectively, to change the meaning. In inflectional languages, the basic and added parts have merged and no longer have separate meaning on their own. And finally, incorporating language incorporates what we’d think of as elements of a sentence into a single word. The Swahili word “hatukuviwanunulia,” for example, is a single word constructed of various parts which, all together, means, “We did not buy those things for those people.”
Another way to classify languages is genetically, by attempting to trace them to their roots, and those roots to their roots, and so on. By finding similarities in modern languages, you can group them into families, and then tentatively reconstruct the ancestor of all the languages in that family. The best-known language family, the Indo-European family, represents around 1.6 billion people and includes most of the languages of Europe and northern India and several regions in between. Not all families are so large; among the aboriginal people of North America, for example, more than 150 families of languages have been identified, and more than 90 have been identified in South America. Families are further subdivided into sub-families, branches and groups. Using this system, English belongs to the Anglo-Frisian group of the West Germanic branch of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family.
Finally, languages can be classified by geographical area; this is useful when studying the ways languages have influenced each other.
Many languages exist in a written form as well as a spoken form. It’s often harder to learn to write a language than to read it, because the written form may have remained static while the spoken form has been changing–which explains a lot of our odd spellings in English, like “light,” which used to be pronounced more the way it looks–and also because sometimes the written form is much more formal than the spoken form. That’s the case in Germany, where High German is used for written communication, but there are many dialects of spoken German.
And speaking of dialects, that’s a variety of language that differs consistently from other varieties of the language spoken in other geographical areas or by other social groups. This is particularly noticeable in England, as Henry Higgins points out in My Fair Lady, but it’s just as noticeable in Canada, where a Nova Scotian speaks quite differently from an Ontarioian, who in turn doesn’t sound the same as a Saskatchewanian. Not only are words pronounced differently, vocabulary is different, too. Very few people outside the prairies would call a farmer’s pond a “slough.”
Other varieties of language include argots–specialized vocabularies used by people who share an activity or interests (teenage slang is an ever-changing argot); jargons, which are specialized vocabularies used within professions or trades, without the connotation of slang that an argot has; pidgins, simplified mixtures of two languages that usually result when two people who speak different languages begin to have regular contact; and creoles, which are new, fuller languages that develop from pidgins as children are born who speak pidgin as their native tongue. The national language of Sierra Leone, Krio, is a creole that was originally an English-based pidgin.
Despite all the differences among languages, they are also remarkably similar. All the many sounds used in modern languages, after all, are drawn from a limited set of sounds that can be produced by any human being. Grammatical structure, no matter how complicated, must similarly be a structure that any human being can grasp.
This means that it is possible for humans to learn more than one language. It’s much harder as an adult than as a child, however, and new research, just released, may point out why: MRI scans of the electrical activity of brains of bilingual individuals reveal that language is stored differently depending on whether the individual learned the second language as a toddler or after puberty. Those who learned the second language as a toddler store it in the same place in the brain as they store their native language, the researchers found, whereas those who learned it during their teenage years, or later, store it in a completely different region of the brain.
This also explains why bilingual individuals who suffer a stroke sometimes lose the ability to speak the second language, while keeping the ability to speak their native language.
Still, just because it’s harder to learn a second language as an adult doesn’t mean it’s impossible. And even though English is increasingly the language of choice around the world (although there are more native speakers of Mandarin Chinese than there are of English, there are more people who speak English as a first or second language than any other tongue), bilingualism opens doors of opportunity and enjoyment that are closed to those of us who are uni-lingual.
It makes me wish I’d paid more attention in French class.
