Human beings are unique in their use of language. Only
humans have the innate, hardwired ability to employ a large vocabulary of words
with a complex grammar to create language itself. Linguistic abilities are
surprisingly uniform across the entire human species, and all normal human beings
learn to speak the language of their native community.
Many theories exist concerning when and how language began, and
because there are no fossil records related to the earliest linguistic
development, the true beginnings of spoken language are lost in time. Early cultures
believed that language was a gift from the gods, and the origins of language
are an integral part of creation myths throughout world mythology. Ironically,
the diversity of language is usually seen as a curse -- a punishment for human
arrogance or disobedience -- a belief best exemplified by the "Tower of
Babel" passage in Genesis, in the Hebrew Bible.
Although some scholars assume there was a primitive language
system dating as far back as two million years, fully developed language is thought
to have been an evolutionary innovation of Homo sapiens, which facilitated
the spread of the species around the globe. Many scientists believe that at
some point in their evolutionary development, humans developed larger and more
sophisticated brains that allowed for the development of language, although
there is no agreement on when this occurred. Richard Leakey, the noted
paleoanthropologist, suggests that Homo sapiens did not originally
possess the necessary anatomy to produce language until 300,000 years ago, while
Steven Pinker, the cognitive scientist, argues that because all modern humans
have identical language abilities, language must have emerged with the first
appearance of modern humans about 200,000 years ago.
Language is a living thing -- highly changeable in vocabulary,
pronunciation, and (more slowly) grammar. Words fall into disuse; others are coined
or borrowed; pronunciations change both over time and geographically, as
populations disperse, or come into contact.
In 2010, Unesco identified 6,000 living languages in the world,
most of which are spoken only by a small number of people. More than 3,000
languages are considered endangered, based on the number of native speakers currently
living, the age of those speakers, and the percentage of children in the community
who are acquiring the language. Africa currently has the highest number of languages
in danger of extinction, with 250 of the continent's 1,400 languages threatened
with imminent disappearance. Once a language is identified as endangered, it
can be stabilized or rescued through language documentation, in which the grammar,
syntax, and vocabulary are recorded and preserved; language revitalization occurs
when a community takes political and educational action to increase the number
of active speakers. In North America, endangered languages are primarily Native
American, such as Oneida, Onandaga, Seneca, and Chinook. (The New York Times
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