Why are there so many languages?

It’s just like religion. There are different religions. For example, christianity rised in a specific area, and people who didn’t hear from it simply didn’t know so they had their own beliefs and all.
A community will differ itself from the other communities.
The world is huge and it’s impossible to work it one way. This question also brings up other great questions like; Why are there different cultures? Why are there countries?

That article is interesting, but it definitely has some issues. The idea of “complexity” in language is already a contestable issue. People like to argue that languages that are isolating (analytic) like Mandarin and English are “simpler” because they don’t have case inflections and complex verb morphology, but these languages are “complex” in their own way; to me, what makes a language “complex” is how difficult it is to learn, but this is difficult to quantify because we can only speak of “difficulty to learn” in comparison with other languages. A person who speaks only Spanish will have a much easier time learning Italian than someone who speaks only Japanese would learning it. That said, languages do seem to lose inflections as time goes on more than they gain them, though gaining them does occur. Look at how Latin spread and formed into French, Italian, Spanish. None of those languages have case inflections, but most of the complex verb morphology is still intact with some new formations.

Anyway, that wasn’t exactly on topic, just wanted to say that. Languages definitely form because of drift; two different peoples can speak the same language in isolated areas and eventually those two peoples could be speaking mutually unintelligible separate languages, although the two languages will still be closely related. I do like the idea that languages with things like eventive marking and other features that work well in a close-knit community might only survive in one. It is a fact that when a language is adopted by many different groups of people who speak different languages to begin with, the language will change and some of its more “unique” features may disappear in favor of ones that are common to all the mother languages of the people learning the new one. Could explain why all of Latin’s descendants lost case inflection—none of them have it; it went away in every new language.

I agree that environment can affect it. A tighter-knit community may use markings of familiarity that a a larger more diverse community might not. A language spoken in one area will have a unique vocabulary to match the environment they observe. But it’s just a fact that languages change and develop when they are isolated. If humans started out speaking the same language, as soon as humans started breaking off into groups and moving around, that language would have already begun to change quite a bit.

If one looks at some isolated but larger geographic units, such as Britain, one will see how those supposedly speaking the same language differ from relatively close neighbors. When transportation and communication were limited and communities isolated (150 years ago) neighbors could be nearly unintelligible to each other. And someone from Cornwall would be distinct from a Londoner’s English. Throw into the mix someone from Durham and the whole place can’t communicate.

Consider that one of the reasons Webster’s Dictionary was important in US History is that it called for a uniform language and spelling among the differing States.

So the question should not be “why are there so many languages” as much as “how soon until we’ll be down to four or five?”

According to one of the oldest human books, we have so many languages because some people tried to create a tower to heaven and God felt insulted by the suggestion. So God gave all the workers different languages to frustrate their efforts of working together. When the workers couldn’t understand one another anymore, they all left.

@zenvelo Or there wasn’t the internet when the first peeps started to communicate.

It’s ALL drift and adaptation. People native to the North Pole probably don’t have a word for “sand,” and people native to the deserts probably don’t have a word for “snow.”

It could be because we all come from different places with different histories and culture.

@Smitha All of our ancestors originated in the same place, with the same culture about 5 to 6 million years ago. We didn’t really start migrating out of Africa until about 2 million years ago. The question that would fascinate me, which is also impossible to answer, would be was there a root language that all succeeding languages sprang from?

I just found this quote “I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification, aided by signs and gestures, of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man’s own instinctive cries. ~ — Charles Darwin, 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.”

The secret to how language evolved is still unknown. Bernard Campbell states flatly in Humankind Emerging (Allyn & Bacon, 2005), “We simply do not know, and never will, how or when language began.”

Of course that’s true. But it didn’t evolve because we all came from some place else. Originally we all came from the same place. And boy, does it evolve fast. I’d wager you couldn’t understand spoken King’s English from 500 years ago.

Relevant and really cool!

Great answers so far. Keep them coming!

I believe the “complexity” of the languages was determined by morphology – the languages that have many “genders,” for example, are harder for adults to grasp. It is also determined by percentage of speakers that learned it as their second language. 71% of English-speakers learned it as their second language, for example. Of course there are other reasons for that high number, but one may be that English is a simpler language. Typically, according to research, the fewer people that speak a language, the more complex that language is.

It’s been a while since I read The Power of Babel (which was awesome), but I am a big believer in drift, and who knows, maybe all languages are descended from a single pre-historical language. The idea is pretty staggering.

I’m not linguist but I am a fan of language, and while I am not a polyglot I have been interested enough to put some time into trying to learn other languages. After chasing several fruitless semesters of Spanish and Russian with some very productive months with Norwegian I totally see the drift. Norse had a huge impact on the English language which means Norwegian is far less opaque than Spanish and Russian were to me. There is a lot of similarity in vocabulary and grammar which makes it a lot easier to get momentum. It’s weird, when I look at a Norwegian text I can see how the words are related to English ones, there are lttle shifts that must have happened from something like a common ancester or creole.

Check it out:

svart = black (like swarthy)
sted = place (like homestead)
blomster = flowers (bloom)
hånd = hand
et sverd = a sword
å hoppe = to jump
å falle = to fall
en kong = a king
å skrive = to write (like scribe)
gul = gold
brun = brown
rød = red
et hjerte = a heart
en kne = a knee (but in norsk the ‘n’ is pronounced!)
skinn = skin (because it looks closer than it sounds, in norsk it is pronounced ‘shin’)
pulver = dust, powder (we’ve got ‘pulverize’ in English but no ‘pulver’. I love it.)
en maskin = a machine (and that ‘sk’ sounds like the ‘ch’ in the english word)
en djevel = a devil
å lope = to run
en gravstein = a gravestone
en vind = a wind

And really, I can just keep going and going with this. Which is awesome because I’m really enjoying Norwegian.

Awesomeness @fundevogel! I wanted to do something like that.

Here is an ancient Scottish ballad we used to give our students, called “Edward, Edward,” with the assignment of translating it to modern English. It’s a pretty cool exercise!

‘Quhy dois zour brand sae drop wi’ bluid,
Edward, Edward?
Quhy dois zour brand sae drop wi’ bluid?
And quhy sae sad gang zee, O?’
‘O, I hae killed my hauke sae guid,
Mither, mither:
O I hae killed my hauke sae guid:
And I had nae mair bot hee, O.’

‘Zour haukis bluid was nevir sae reid,
Edward, Edward:
Zour haukis bluid was never sae reid,
My deir son I tell thee, O.’
‘O, I hae killed my reid-roan steid,
Mither, mither:
O, I hae killed my reid-roan steid,
That erst was sae fair and free, O.’

‘Zour steid was auld, and ze hae gat mair,
Edward, Edward:
Zour steid was auld, and ze hae gat mair,
Sum other dule ze drie, O.’
‘O, I hae killed my fadir deir,
Mither, mither:
O, I hae killed my fadir deir,
Alas! and wae is mee, O!’

‘And quhatten penance wul ze drie for that,
Edward, Edward?
And quhatten penance will ze drie for that?
My deir son, now tell me, O.’
‘Ile set my feit in zonder boat,
Mither, mither:
Ile set my feit in zonder boat,
And Ile fare ovir the sea, O.’

‘And quhat wul ze doe wi’ zour towirs and zour ha’,
Edward, Edward?
And quhat wull ze doe wi’ zour towirs and zour ha’,
That were sae fair to see, O?’
‘Ile let thame stand til they doun fa’,
Mither, mither:
Ile let thame stand til they doun fa’,
For here nevir mair maun I bee, O.’

‘And quhat wul ze leive to zour bairns and zour wife,
Edward, Edward?
And quhat wul ze leive to zour bairns and zour wife
Quhan ze gang ovir the sea, O?’
‘The warldis room, late them beg throw life,
Mither, mither:
The warldis room, let them beg throw life,
For thame nevir mair wul I see, O.’

‘And quhat wul ze leive to zour ain mither deir,
Edward, Edward?
And quhat wul ze leive to zour ain mither deir?
My deir son, now tell me, O.’
‘The curse of hell frae me sall ze beir,
Mither, mither:
The curse of hell frae me sall ze beir,
Sic counseils ze gave to me, O.’

That is totally badass @Dutchess_III. It looks closer to modern English than the Old English I’ve encountered.

Some languages diverged from a common source and others, I think, developed independently. Chinese and English for example don’t have much in common although you can still translate from one to the other. There are difficulties however as Chinese words don’t always correspond with words in English. The words for colours for example don’t always have an equivalent.

The Chinese and the Romans hardly communicated at all and the tribes of the Amazon existed in complete isolation. It is hardly surprising that their languages developed differently.

Answering the main question…

Um…because God in heaven knew ahead of time that the Holy Bible wouldn’t be confusing enough (good God in heaven!) and that He had to go, beforehand, and make every ancient being have their own mumble-jumble?

@flutherother “The words for colours for example don’t always have an equivalent.”

That is totally fascinating, it makes you question the universality of something as seemingly simple as how we see the world.

Language log looks at another study that also uses the World Atlas of Language Structures and finds methodological problems:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3090

The fact is that all languages are equally complex, but in different ways. For instance while it’s true that English lost morphological complexity, it gained syntactic complexity.

As Spock would say @morphail “Fascinating.”

@fundevogel Even odder is the language that doesn’t have a word for time.

@flutherother even if that’s true, we have to be careful when we talk about what it means
http://stancarey.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/amondawa-has-no-word-for-time/

Isolation of different peoples is what caused different languages to develop and, most unfortunately, making the world smaller is causing languages to disappear

^^^^ :(. Sad. But at least we’re at a point in our evolution now where we’re trying to catch them and preserve them.

Because agriculture and globalization is a relatively recent phenomenon. The typical hunter-gatherer group was 50–100 people.

It is simply a mystery as to the many kinds of languages that humans speak. Maybe there are too many of us and each one of us is different too. So for the people of the whole world to speak one language only is simply impossible.

Not really a “mystery…”