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Historical Development of Language

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Historical Development of Language

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Ruth Rodriguez
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Historical development of Language (DARWINIAN)

Darwin started thinking about the origin of language in the late 1830s. The subject formed part of his
wide-ranging speculations about the transmutation of species. In his private notebooks, he reflected on
the communicative powers of animals, their ability to learn new sounds and even to associate them with
words. “The distinction of language in man is very great from all animals”, he wrote, “but do not
overrate—animals communicate to each other” (Barrett ed. 1987, p. 542-3). Darwin observed the
similarities between animal sounds and various natural cries and gestures that humans make when
expressing strong emotions such as fear, surprise, or joy. He noted the physical connections between
words and sounds, exhibited in words like “roar”, “crack”, and “scrape” that seemed imitative of the
things signified. He drew parallels between language and music, and asked: “did our language
commence with singing—is this the origin of our pleasure in music—do monkeys howl in harmony”?
(Barrett ed. 1987, p. 568).

The origin of language was widely studied and controversially debated in the Victorian period in a
variety of fields, including comparative philology and linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, and
psychology. Some argued that human speech derived from natural, instinctive utterances that were
shared with some animals, and that languages developed and spread gradually according to various
natural laws and processes. Proponents of the natural language theory included Darwin’s
cousin, Hensleigh Wedgwood, the liberal Anglican scholar Frederic Farrar, the German philologist August
Schleicher, and the American philologist William Dwight Whitney. Others argued that language was
uniquely human, a manifestation of man’s higher nature and an instrument of his reason. Its origin was
divine, and its development more akin to an art, than to any purely natural process. The leading
advocate of this natural theological view of language was Friedrich Max Müller, a German linguist and
oriental scholar who had emigrated to Britain and who eventually obtained a professorship at Oxford. In
a series of influential lectures delivered several years after Darwin’s Origin of Species, Max Müller
asserted that language was the “one great barrier between the brute and man”; “no process of natural
selection will ever distil significant words out of the notes of birds and the cries of beasts” (Müller 1861,
1: 22-3, 354).

Darwin eventually published his views on language in Descent of Man (1871), as part of a chapter on the
comparative mental powers of humans and the lower animals. He acknowledged that language had
“justly been considered as one of the chief distinctions between man and the lower animals”; but he
went on to emphasize the similarities between animal and human communication. Darwin’s arguments
were based on his broad knowledge of anthropology, language use and acquisition in children, linguistic
pathologies, and the behaviour of a wide range of animals, wild and domestic. Much of this information
had been gathered through correspondence, as well as observations of his own children and pets.
Darwin described how language might have evolved through natural and sexual selection. He compared
birds learning to sing to infants babbling. An early progenitor of man, he wrote, probably used his voice
as did the male gibbon, to produce musical cadences for courtship, and to compete with other males.
The origins of language as a system of signifiers, he added, might have evolved from the imitation of the
sounds of various predators (growls and snarls, for example), which functioned as warning signs. Darwin
addressed the natural theology of Max Müller and others by arguing that language use, while requiring a
certain mental capacity, would also stimulate brain development, enabling long trains of thought and
strengthening reasoning power. Vocalization in humans would be greatly enhanced by the development
of other functions, especially the use of the hands. Finally, Darwin drew an extended analogy between
the evolution of languages and species, noting in each domain the presence of rudiments, of crossing
and blending, and of variation, and remarking on how each developed gradually through a process of
struggle: “the survival of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection”
(Descent 1: 61).

Debates about the origin of language are still ongoing. Are there specific language centres in the human
brain? Do comparable structures exist in the brains of primates? Are animals capable of using language
in a structured way, and do they possess powers of reason? Did linguistic ability, such as the use of
syntax, evolve gradually, or did it emerge rapidly or even all at once in some now extinct progenitor of
the human race? Such questions, addressed in a variety of scientific disciplines, such as neurology,
palaeoanthropology, and animal psychology, build upon the work of Darwin and his contemporaries,
while taking that work in new directions.

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