The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece which summarizes a recent article in Science by Quentin Atkinson concerning the language from which all other languages derived. Here are the opening paragraphs:
The world’s 6,000 or so modern languages may have all descended from a single ancestral tongue spoken by early African humans between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, a new study suggests.
The finding, published Thursday in the journal Science, could help explain how the first spoken language emerged, spread and contributed to the evolutionary success of the human species.
Here is the abstract from the essay in Science:
Human genetic and phenotypic diversity declines with distance from Africa, as predicted by a serial founder effect in which successive population bottlenecks during range expansion progressively reduce diversity, underpinning support for an African origin of modern humans. Recent work suggests that a similar founder effect may operate on human culture and language. Here I show that the number of phonemes used in a global sample of 504 languages is also clinal and fits a serial founder–effect model of expansion from an inferred origin in Africa. This result, which is not explained by more recent demographic history, local language diversity, or statistical non-independence within language families, points to parallel mechanisms shaping genetic and linguistic diversity and supports an African origin of modern human languages.
This study seems off to me somehow. I haven’t read the actual study, so I can’t confirm or deny that they’re controlled for factors in more recent history, but the fact that a language like Spanish has more phonemes than Japanese (in theory according to this) shouldn’t be because of a diffusion of language out from southern Africa; Spanish has only been in Spain for two millennia, and its ancestors had only been in Europe for maybe four, and this is proposing something 50,000 or more years ago. Why would a language moving toward southern Africa gain more phonemes? It can’t just be because of standard genetic diffusion.
Anyone wanna bet how fast this will get taken apart by a linguist who studies, say, Papua New Guinea?
Those are good points. Furthermore, I wonder how/if he addresses the fact that there are several languages, including Sumerian, that do not seem to be related to any other.
Spanish may be only two thousand years old but it’s ancestor(s) are older.
That said, this is a pretty audacious claim and can expect some rough treatment. But, who knows, it might prove an interesting ride.
Do the languages in Papau New Guinea have high phoneme inventories? I thought they were typical-to-low. That’s what Atkinson’s article is about.
And the issue of language isolates is simply ascribes to lack of enough data, i.e., a linguistic ‘missing link’. I doubt it’s a real problem for this kind of argument.
But, as I was reading various interesting responses to it (e.g., http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/where-on-earth-did-language-begin/), in the end, this aligned with my own thoughts (although I certainly couldn’t have said it so well):
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3090#more-3090