Question: Why do people speak different languages? (it's to do with sound!)

Damien Hall answered on 18 Jun 2011:

Thanks Suzi!

I’m afraid that, when you get right down to the bottom of it, no-one knows why languages are different, though we can guess. The reason why we don’t really know is because we don’t know much about most of human history – and that’s because people have probably been speaking languages of some kind for maybe millions of years, but we can’t study most of that history because those people didn’t have writing systems, so they couldn’t write it down. The earliest writing (that we know of) was done between 3,000BC and 2,000BC in Sumer (which is where Iraq is now) – you can see more about that here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing#The_beginning_of_writing

and here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform

Before that time, we can work out what the languages probably sounded like, because we have worked out how languages often change across time, but we have no direct evidence about it.

What seems most likely at the moment is that several different groups of humans started to use language at about the same time, but in different places. So it’s quite likely that they would speak differently, because the different groups were not speaking to each other! After that, each group’s language changed differently because they were different to start with – and we ended up with the 6,000 or so languages we have today. From that point of view (changing across thousands of years), languages are quite like people – there’s a subtle change every time some group passes on its language to some other group. In fact, we use the same words to talk about language history as we do about people’s genetic history – so we have language families, a language that comes from a previous one is the daughter language of a mother language, two languages that come from the same mother language are sister languages.

Closer to our modern time, to take the example of English and French, they are different because their mother languages were different. English is descended from Germanic, a language family that was spoken in Northern Europe around where Germany is now, but French is descended from Latin, spoken in Southern Europe. There are Latin-based languages almost everywhere where the Roman Empire extended to: other ones are Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Rumanian, and other smaller ones like Catalan (Northern Spain) and Romansch (Switzerland).

That’s a long answer to a great question – thanks for it!