How many discrete languages are there

If language is a form of cultural evolution, it is useful to look at the relationship between its historical progression and changes in human evolutionary physiology. Whilst some observations have been made such as the descended larynx that enables human speech , it is difficult to isolate any one physiological feature in cognate language use red deer and lions, for example, also have a descended larynx.

Thus, language could evolve from a rudimentary set of culturally transmitted signals, impoverished vocalisations or manual gestures to symbolic words and grammar via selective genetic adaptation, given the relative social utility of such communication. However, people are the product of their genes, gene expression and also the environment—all three are involved in the evolutionary process. Cultural evolution leads to the adaptation of a universal grammar.

We can ask then the fundamental questions: What is the reason for linguistic diversity? What is the rate of linguistic evolutionary change? How quickly do languages adapt?

What is the approximate rate of language change? However, this is increasingly tested by conditions of globalisation, in which it could be argued that technology precedes the use of language frequency and adoption of new linguistic constructs.

In this way, humans are also different from some other animal species in depending on social transmission for adaptive behaviours. Main determinants are learning ontogeny , learning produces cultural evolution, glossogeny take place with much slower biological evolution and development of phenotype phylogeny.

There are many more changes from language change ontogeny and learning at cultural level before physical genetic adaptation and change to phenotype phylogeny.

So both innate endowment and cultural evolution development of memes, forms of cultural encoding such as library holdings, the development of the lexicon and public memory, etc. Occurs through millennia and through changes at the individual level, the wider cultural level of the lexicon , and biologically to the species. But ultimately genes encode the linguistic ability of people within the society, although language changes the fitness of the landscape for cultural formations.

Intentional agency enters into most human communications. Because of the innate complexity of language, individuals may not have enough in common to facilitate open and honest communication all the time.

If not all communication, speech and language is trustworthy, then some features of language may not have a selected advantage for evolution, depending on the cognitive and social cost of information exchange.

This leads to the two features of human language use. Nevertheless, language diversity may not have a basis in issues of trust. However, human biological complexity and conscious cognition in language occur on related but different levels of affect. Coeval with language use, people have the ability to represent different referential locations of time and space through symbolic communication.

While the basis of that ability might lie in gene acquisition and physiological capability, the sociality of language is largely separate from biological substrates. Hence, we can imagine that language use evolves in an individual's lifetime through acquisition of different linguistic competencies: for example, grammar and lexicon tens of years.

This stage is known as ontogeny, possibly leading to genetic adaptation through the Baldwin effect. However, languages evolve over hundreds of years think, for example, of the differences between Chaucer, Shakespeare and the modern novel. This stage is known as glossogeny. The ability of species to engage with language abilities such as a universal grammar is acquired over thousands of years. That is known as phylogeny. It is difficult to tell from evolutionary archaeology exactly how changes in human phylogeny resulted in the genetic selection for complex language ability amongst humans.

Fitch suggests that it occurred somewhere between , years ago and the present day [ 28 ]. The proponents of Universal Grammar UG argue that people are born with linguistic competency which has a genetic substrate.

Thus, relatively small changes at the phenotypic level can lead to quite large cognitive and behavioural changes. However, as Fitch suggests, many such calls are not intentionally referential and might not shape calling in ways relevant to the listener's knowledge [ 29 ].

This does not necessarily imply that animals cannot individuate at a mental level in their communication, but rather they may not have theories of mind that are capable of attributing more than physiological awareness of others. For Biological evolution, a canonical interactor is an organism as it interacts with environment, the ecosystem and fellow organisms, in such a way as it causes differential replication [ 30 ].

Either organism survives and reproduces or does not survive or reproduce. If it does reproduce, then its genes are differentially replicated. There is despite the conscious effort and motivation of a speaker and writer a degree of randomness in replication process and random fluctuations in replicator frequencies. If a fluctuation is greater than zero, replication can take place and if the fluctuation happens to zero, then the replicator extinguished. The process of genetic drift is so termed because that change takes place in population simply due to random processes, and no selection takes place [ 31 ].

According to the argument of language evolution as a gradual adaption in human society from genetic assimilation and culturalization, the underlying genetic substrate of language enables a Universal Grammar, which is a set of grammatical principles that applies across all human languages.

This goes some way to explaining language diversity—each society develops its own adaptation to a different linguistic environment that fits its locality and social identity. However, language might be shaped by physiological limitations that are not entirely dedicated to language. The difference is that in the latter language conditions people to do the same thing but not necessarily the objectively true thing.

Such language acquisition contributes to the reproductive potential of the individual. At the level of individual and group language use, language may be seen as a mapping device between meanings and signals. In this way, languages may be composed with a shared signal structure, or be seen as being holistic, whereby such structure may or may not be implicated in a shared meaning space [ 34 ]. As Kuun points out, acculturation can be a social mechanism that acts as a catalyst for new identities and for language change [ 35 ].

When people are speaking the same language they do not necessarily share the same identity. The constructivist approach argues that ethnic identity can change constantly and that everyone identity is subject to change through language [ 36 ]. Yet at the heart of this capacity of ours lies an incredibly simple piece of mental technology: Merge. Merge takes two bits of language, say two words, and creates out of them another bit of language.

It builds the hierarchical structures of language. M erge was proposed by Noam Chomsky in the early s. He argued that this single piece of mental technology, plus language specific constraints that children could learn from their linguistic experiences, was enough to capture the syntax of all human languages.

Merge says that we can take these two bits of language and from these create a new bit of language. Instead we build a new hierarchical unit. This unit puts together the verb drink with the noun wine to create the phrase drink wine , with wine being the grammatical object of drink. Each box is a bit of language. The only information the box adds is that the bits inside it are grouped together. The words drink and wine are bits of language, and Merge says that a grouping of these can also be a bit of language.

We can represent this with boxes like this:. Merge has created a self-similar structure: a larger bit of language containing two smaller bits of language. Boxes within boxes. An invisible hierarchy. Now, in spoken or written language, we have to put one word after the other. Speaking, and to a lesser extent signing, flattens the hierarchy that Merge builds into a sequence, and that sequence has an order.

This means that this structure, which is just one structure as far as Merge is concerned, can be pronounced in two ways. We either pronounce it as wine drink , or as drink wine.

The grammatical object either appears before the verb, or after it. Those are the only two logical possibilities. The second is, of course, English. Linguists usually write the outcome of Merge using little tree diagrams.

These tree diagrams give us the information that comes from Merge what words group together , plus information about order. The diagrams for English and Japanese look like this:. These trees are the same in terms of Merge, but distinct in the order of their parts.

Now we have nested boxes. One big unit containing two smaller units, one of which is the result of a previous process of Merge. The Japanese word that best translates the English word I is watashiwa , so we can write our two trees like this:. English is a subject-verb-object language, while Japanese is a subject-object-verb language. But both are identical as far as Merge is concerned. There are also languages that mix up these orders. Malagasy, for example, has the English order for drink wine , but puts the subject after that unit:.

The Merge structure for Malagasy is just the same as that for English or Japanese, but while those languages put the subject first, Malagasy puts it last. The last logical possibility is where we say the equivalent of wine drink I to mean I drink wine. In fact, for many years, linguists were unable to find a language where that was the natural order to express this thought. There he worked on learning and analyzing the language of a local tribe, the Hixkaryana.

As Derbyshire worked on the language, he discovered that it had a basic order exactly the reverse of English. To express The boy caught a fish , the Hixkaryana said the equivalent of A fish caught the boy :. Languages change gradually over time, maintaining intelligibility across adjacent generations, but eventually yielding very different systems. The notion of distinctness among languages, then, is much harder to resolve than it seems at first sight.

Political and social considerations trump purely linguistic reality, and the criterion of mutual intelligibility is ultimately inadequate. So does the science of Linguistics provide a better basis for measuring the number of different languages spoken in the world? When we address the question of just when forms of speech differ systematically from a linguistic point of view, we get answers that are potentially crisp and clear, but rather surprising.

If we try to distinguish languages from one another simply in terms of their words and the patterns we can observe in sentences, problems arise.

Different languages may display the same sentence patterns, while a single language may display a great variety of patterns. In general, linguists have found that the analysis of the external facts of language use gives us at best a slippery object of study.

Rather more coherent, it seems, is the study of the abstract knowledge speakers have which allows them to produce and understand what they say or hear or read: their internalized knowledge of the grammar of their language. We might propose, then, that instead of counting languages in terms of external forms, we might try to count the range of distinct grammars in the world.

How might we do this? What differentiates one grammar from another? Some aspects of grammatical knowledge, like the way pronouns are interpreted with respect to another expression in the same sentence, seem to be common across languages. In She thinks that Mary is smart, the pronoun she can refer to any female in the universe with one exception: she here cannot refer to the same individual as Mary.

This seems to be a fact not about English, but about language in general, because the same facts recur in every language when the structural relations are the same. On the other hand, the fact that adjectives precede their nouns in English we say a red balloon, not a balloon red is a fact about English, since the opposite is true, for instance, in French. If we had a complete inventory of the set of parameters that can serve in this way, we could then say that each particular collection of values for those parameters that we could identify in the knowledge of some set of speakers should count as a distinct language.

But let us see what happens when we apply this approach to a single linguistic area, say Northern Italy. Consider the facts of negative sentences, for example. The functioning of negation here establishes a parameter that distinguishes these and other grammars. This is only the beginning, though. When we look more closely at the speech of various areas in Northern Italy, we find several other parameters that distinguish one grammar from another within this area, such that each of them can vary from place to place in ways that are independent of all of the others.

Still staying within Northern Italy, let us suppose that there are, say, ten such parameters that distinguish one grammar from another. This is really quite a conservative estimate, in light of the variation that has in fact been found there.

But if each of these can vary independently of the others, collectively they define a set of two to the tenth, or 1, distinct grammars, and indeed scholars have estimated that somewhere between and of these distinct possibilities are actually instantiated in the region!

Of course, the implications of this result for the world as a whole must be based on a thorough study of the range and limits of possible grammatical variation. Since the number of possible grammatical systems expands exponentially as the number of parameters grows, if we have only about 25 or 30 of these, the number of possible languages in this sense becomes huge: well over a billion, on the assumption of thirty distinct parameters.

When we look at the languages of the world, they may seem bewilderingly diverse. From the point of view of communication systems more generally, however, they are remarkably similar to one another. Human language differs from the communicative behavior of every other known organism in a number of fundamental ways, all shared across languages. By comparison with the communicative devices of herring gulls, honey bees, dolphins or any other non-human animal, language provides us with a system that is not stimulus bound and ranges over an infinity of possible distinct messages.

It achieves this with a limited, finite system of units that combine hierarchically and recursively into larger units. The words themselves are structured from a small inventory of sounds basic to the language, individually meaningless elements combined according to a system completely independent of the way words combine into phrases and sentences.

The particular linguistic system that each individual controls goes far beyond the direct experience from which knowledge of it arose. And the principles governing these systems of sounds, words and meanings are largely common across languages, with only limited possibilities for difference the parameters described above.

In all these ways, human language is so different from any other known system in the natural world that the narrowly constrained ways in which one grammar can differ from another fade into insignificance.

Donate Jobs Center News Room. Search form Search. How many languages are there in the world? Stephen R. Anderson Download this document as a pdf.