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Link to original content: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28738867
Q&A: What is human language, when did it evolve and why should we care? - PubMed Skip to main page content
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. 2017 Jul 24;15(1):64.
doi: 10.1186/s12915-017-0405-3.

Q&A: What is human language, when did it evolve and why should we care?

Mark Pagel  1
Affiliations

Q&A: What is human language, when did it evolve and why should we care?

Mark Pagel. BMC Biol. .

Abstract

Human language is unique among all forms of animal communication. It is unlikely that any other species, including our close genetic cousins the Neanderthals, ever had language, and so-called sign 'language' in Great Apes is nothing like human language. Language evolution shares many features with biological evolution, and this has made it useful for tracing recent human history and for studying how culture evolves among groups of people with related languages. A case can be made that language has played a more important role in our species' recent (circa last 200,000 years) evolution than have our genes.

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Conflict of interest statement

The author declares that he has no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Phylogenetic tree of a small subset of the approximately 400 or so Indo-European languages. Words that the languages use for the meaning ‘hand’ are colour-coded to identify cognate classes. Rectangles along the branches identify regions of the tree where new cognate classes might have arisen. Here the French and Spanish languages share cognate forms for ‘hand’ derived from an earlier Latin form ‘manus’. French and Spanish are part of the familiar grouping of Romance languages. By comparison, the word ‘hand’ is cognate between English and German and this cognate class identifies part of the Germanic grouping of languages. The words for ‘hand’ in Greek and in the extinct Anatolian languages Hittite and Tocharian form two additional cognate sets. Combining many different cognate sets from many different vocabulary items allows investigators to draw detailed phylogenetic trees of entire language families (see text)
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