2. How long humans have had language is not known. Some think that the earliest Homo Sapiens, perhaps 100,000 years ago, may have had the beginnings of language. Others believe that language developed only in the last 40,000 years or so, with the emergence of modern humans.

3. Because the only unambiguous remains of language are found on written tablets, and the earliest stone tablets date back only 5,000 years, pinpointing the emergence of earliest language remains speculative.

4. Theories about when language developed are based on nonlinguistic information such as when cranial capacity expanded dramatically, when complex technology and symbolic artifacts (such as art) started to be made, when the anatomy of the throat, as inferred from fossil remains, began to resemble what we see in modern humans.

5. The majority of scholars believe that spoken language was a radical departure from communication that preceded it. However, based on observations of nonhuman primates in the wild and in the laboratory, many primatologists have questioned whether there is an enormous gap between nonhuman primate and human communicational capacities.

6. In fact, some think that all the brain prerequisites for language were in place before the evolutionary split between apes and humans, and they view the emergence of spoken language as a quantitative rather than a qualitative difference.

7. Noam Chomsky and other theoreticians of grammar suggest that there is an innate language-acquisition device in the human brain, as innate to humans as call systems are to other animals. If humans are unique in having an innate capacity for language, then some mutation or series of mutations had to be favored in human evolution, not before the human line separated from apes.

8. Whether such a mechanism in fact exists is not clear. But we do know that the actual development of individual language is not completely biologically determined; if it were, all human beings would speak the same brain- generated language. Instead, about 4,000 to 5,000 mutually unintelligible languages have been identified. More than 2,000 of them were still spoken as of recently, most by people who did not traditionally have a system of writing.

9. Can we learn anything about the origin of language by studying the languages of nonliterate (no writing) and technologically simpler societies? The answer is no, because such languages are not simpler or less developed than ours. The sound systems, vocabularies, and grammar of technologically simpler people are in no way inferior to those of people with more complex technology. A language that lacks terminology for some of our conveniences may have a rich vocabulary for events or natural phenomena that are of particular importance to the people in that society.

10. How can we investigate the origins of language? Some linguists think that understanding the way children acquire language, can help us understand the origins of language. Other linguists have suggested that an understanding of how Creole languages develop will also tell us something about the origin of language.

11. Some languages developed in various areas where European colonial powers established commercial enterprises that relied on imported labor, generally slaves. The laborers in one place often came from several different societies and in the beginning would speak wit their masters and with each other in some kind of pidgin (simplified) version of the masters’ language.

12. Pidgin languages lack many of the building blocks found in the languages of whole societies, building blocks. such as prepositions (to, on, and so forth) and auxiliary verbs (designating future and other tenses). Many pidgin languages developed into and were replaced by so-called Creole languages, which incorporate much of the vocabulary of the masters’ language but also have a grammar that differs from it and from the grammars of the laborers’ native languages.

13. Derek Bickerton argues that there are striking grammatical similarities in Creole languages throughout the world. This similarity, he thinks, is consistent with the idea that some grammar is inherited by all humans. Creole languages, therefore, may resemble early human languages.

14. All Creoles use intonation instead of a change in word order to ask a question. The Creole equivalent of the question “can you fix this?” would be “You can fix this?” The Creole version puts a rising inflection at the end.

15. All creoles express the future and the past in the same grammatical way, by the use of particles (such as the English shall) between subject and verb, and they all employ double negative, as in the Guyana English Creole “Nobody no like me.”

16. It is possible that many other things about language are universal, that all languages are similar in many respects, because of the way humans are “wired” or because people in all societies have similar experiences. For example, names for frogs may usually contain r sounds because frogs make them.

17. Apparently a child is equipped from birth with the capacity to reproduce all the sounds used by the world’s languages and to learn any system of grammar. 6-month-old ~ Distinguish sounds of about 600 consonants and 200 vowels. 1-year old ~ recognize the salient sounds and sound clusters of their caretakers.

18. Children’s acquisition of the structure and meaning of language has been called the most difficult intellectual achievement in life. All over the world children begin to learn language at about the same age. By 12 or 13 months of age, children are able to name a few objects and actions, By 18 to 20 months they can make one key word stand for a whole sentence: “Out!” or “Juice.”

19. Evidence suggests that children acquire the concept of a word as a whole, learning sequences of sounds that are stressed or at the ends of words (e.g., “raffe” for “giraffe). Even hearing-impaired children learning signs in ASL tend to acquire and use signs in a similar fashion.

20. By 18-24 months, children tend to progress to two-word sentences. In their sentences they express themselves in “telegraph” form – using nonlike words and verblike words but leaving out the seemingly less important words. A two-word sentence such as “shoes off” may stand for “Take my shoes off,” or “More milk” may stand for “Give me more milk, please.” They do not utter their two words in random order.

21. They seem to select an order that fits the conventions of adult language, so they are likely to say “Daddy eat, “ not “Eat Daddy.” In other words, they tend to put the subject first, as adults do. Adults do not utter sentences such as “Daddy eat,” so children seem to know a lot about how to put words together with little or no direct teaching from their caretaker.

22. If there is a basic grammar imprinted in the human mind, we should not be surprised that children’s early and later speech patterns seem to be similar in different languages. Children’s later speech is similar to the structure of Creole language. The “errors” children make in speaking are consistent with the grammar of creoles. For example, English-speaking children 3 to 4 years old tend to ask questions by intonation alone. They also tend to use double negative, such as “I don’t see no dog,” even though the adults around them do not speak that way and consider the children’s speech “wrong.”

23. Some linguists argue that evidence for an innate grammar is weak because children all over the world do not develop the same grammatical features at similar age. For example, word order is a more important determinant of meaning in English than in Turkish. The endings of words are more important in Turkish. The word at the beginning of the sentence in English is likely to be the subject. The word with a certain ending in Turkish is the likely subject. Consistent with this difference, English-speaking children learn word order earlier than Turkish children do.

24. Future research on children’s acquisition of language and on the structure of Creole languages may bring us closer to an understanding of the origins of human language. But even if much of grammar is universal, ee still need to understand how and why the thousands of languages in the world vary, which brings us to the conceptual tools linguists have had to invent in order to study languages.