My First Language is African

Language is at least 50,000, maybe 100,000 years old, as best scientists can tell. So if I were to ask you to muster your best resources and tell me where language began on earth or whether it was born in several places or started from a single area, how in the world would you solve this enigmatic question? Professorial brainiac, Quentin Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, used a complex matrix of phonetic commonality (read: stuff with common sounds) to trace adjacent linguistic regions and see if there were patterns of this sound-driven commonality and if there were increasing or decreasing similarities converging on or emerging from one or more different places. Atkinson had to reach way back in time, long before any written tongues.

“The detection of such an ancient signal in language is surprising. Because words change so rapidly, many linguists think that languages cannot be traced very far back in time. The oldest language tree so far reconstructed, that of the Indo-European family, which includes English, goes back 9,000 years at most… [Atkinson] has shattered this time barrier, if his claim is correct, by looking not at words but at phonemes — the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language.” New York Times, April 14^th. “In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances. Thus a phoneme is a group of slightly different sounds which are all perceived to have the same function by speakers of the language or dialect in question.” Wikipedia. Did I mention that Atkinson is also a math wiz?

The good professor looked at 504 languages and, writing in the April 15^th Science Magazine (with a catchy, gotta-read-it-now title: Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa), tells us that all of the analytical computer models strongly suggested that commonality emanating from only one place: southern Africa. Thus, according to this study, all language was born of some ancient “founder” African tongue that was the mother of every other language on earth. In the formal discourse of the study: “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.” ScienceMag.org, April 15^th.

While some experts may challenge the methodology, there is genetic evidence to support the notion that southern Africa is indeed the birthplace of modern man: “Dr. Atkinson’s finding fits with other evidence about the origins of language. The Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert belong to one of the earliest branches of the genetic tree based on human mitochondrial DNA. Their languages belong to a family known as Khoisan and include many click sounds, which seem to be a very ancient feature of language. And they live in southern Africa, which Dr. Atkinson’s calculations point to as the origin of language. But whether Khoisan is closest to some ancestral form of language ‘is not something my method can speak to,’ Dr. Atkinson said.” NY Times. Philosophy, religion, history, biology, cosmology and astronomy are all disciplines that address the big question: who are we, and where did we come from? What do you believe?

I’m Peter Dekom, and big questions actually do keep me awake at night.