Language evolution puzzle

The world is estimated to still be home to 7,000 human languages. While some have recently gone extinct and many more are under pressure, researchers are increasingly keen to preserve this remarkable and unique aspect of human cultural history and explore how they have evolved. Analyses of the sounds and meanings of the words in different languages have led researchers to create 'evolutionary trees' of families of languages that are thought to shed light on language evolution over the past 6,000 to 10,000 years. But with evidence of written language going back around 5,000 years, it is considered that our spoken languages go back many thousands of years before then. So some researchers have wondered whether other structural features of language, such as particular elements of grammar, or sounds within words may be more conservative and shed light on the earlier evolution of languages. A new report by S.J. Greenhill at the University of Auckland and colleagues at the Universities of Oxford and Reading in Proceedings of the Royal Society B (published online) has examined whether there is evidence of language elements that can provide deeper evolutionary insights. They have used a new World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) to investigate the question. This new atlas is now available online in a project run jointly by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Max Planck Digital Library. Feature " The network analysis of WALS structural features points to some intriguing possible deep relationships, perhaps most notably the cluster linking together many of the major language families of Eurasia, " they say. But the tantalizing possibility of deeper insights into language evolution proved elusive. New analysis of rates of evolution failed to identify any features that evolve at consistently slower rates than the basic vocabulary, they found. If the signal in the vocabulary does stretch back as far as 10,000 years, then the new results suggest that other language features are also limited to a similar time horizon. The researchers had set themselves a tough challenge. There is real difficulty in identifying consistently stable language features. The classification of vocabulary data into sets relies on similarities The task of unravelling the remarkable development of human languages has become more complex according to a new study. Nigel Williams reports. Demanding: A row of interpreters prepare to translate a Brussels meeting into the many languages of the European Union. (Photo: Dominique …