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April 14-16, 2011: International press on unique origin of all world’s languages
This isn’t a new hypothesis, it has been largely developed by several linguists among whom one of its prime defenders Merritt Ruhlen: all the languages of the planet might well descend from one original language, also known as proto-human language, reaching nearly 50,000 years back and spoken by early homo sapiens.
In 1991 geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza agreed wholeheartedly: modern man, most probably of African origin, emigrated first to the Middle East, then across Eurasia and finally to Australia and the Americas. Cavalli-Sforza worked up from this initial assumption to establish a correlation between genetic and linguistic evolutions: languages gradually grew apart along with the different migrations over history, he says.
This time New Zealand evolutionist psychologist Quentin Atkinson brings his own contribution to the idea of a unique ancestral language spoken 50,000 to 70,000 years ago, basing his work on population genetics, as did Cavalli-Sforza. Atkinson suggests applying the « founder effect » principle to languages: when a small group breaks off a given population, the genetic diversity of this group decreases, and this process, repeating itself according to the migrations, generates a gradual loss of genetic complexity; in the same way, Atkinson believes the complexity of languages decreases according to millennia of migrations.
To back up his theory, Atkinson relies not on words but on phonemes, i.e. the smallest units of sound in language. Studying 504 languages over 5 continents, he established that those with the largest number of phonemes are all spoken in South and West Africa, the supposed cradle of the world’s mother language, while at the other end of the line, the languages with the smallest amount of phonemes are all located in the Pacific islands and South America: for instance, Ixu (Africa) has 141 phonemes, German (Europe) has 41, Mandarin (China) has 32, Hawaiian (Pacific) has 13, and Piraha (South America) has 11…
Thus the further people migrated from Africa, the more phonemes their languages might have lost. This, according to Atkinson, proves that just as human beings might all come from Africa, their languages might all stem from one common ancestral language, also born on the African continent.
Needless to say such a theory will be matter for heated debate between the promoters of the unique original language theory, and those claiming the origins of language are multiple…
Refer to the articles below for more information:
In English: Science, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal
In French: Slate, Jeune Afrique