Home » Education & Career » World Languages » Mother Tongue: The Search for the First Language

Mother Tongue: The Search for the First Language

©

The late 20th century saw two significant challenges to fundamental linguistic paradigms, challenges that continue to fuel animated discussions among linguists. World Languages has already visited the controversy over animal language, but the other tree-shaker, monogenetic theory, has so far rated only a mention. A compelling idea with far-reaching implications, it deserves a column of its own.

Briefly, monogenetic theory holds that all languages descend from a single, original "Mother Tongue." Though this contradicts the traditional view that language evolved independently in several places, the hypothesis itself isn't particularly controversial. The problem is proving it, a process that taxes existing science, some say to the breaking point.

Monogenetic theory originated in the Soviet Union, where scientists reasoned that linguistic evolution probably mirrors biological evolution, with contemporary language families (e.g., Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Austronesian) evolving from super- or macro-families. Using conventional historical linguistics techniques, Soviet researchers went on to reconstruct "Nostratic" ("our countrymen's language"), the alleged forerunner of most European, Asian, and African languages. To date, paleolinguists (linguists who study prehistoric languages) have filled volumes with what they claim to be Nostratic root words.

If authentic, Nostratic would be no more than a whisper removed from the Mother Tongue. Therefore, reconstructing the other theorised ancestral macro-families would pave the way for the ultimate reconstruction: the Mother Tongue herself.

An exciting prospect, to be sure. But as British archaeologist Colin Renfrew points out, monogenetic studies teeter on what amounts to a quaking bog of educated conjecture. Historical linguists compare core vocabulary, such as numbers, basic tools, and body parts, to establish relationships between languages. For example, a chart of numbers from the Indo-European languages clearly reveals a relationship, albeit one that may be concealed beneath demonstrable patterns of change. These data can then be linked to parent traditions, such as Proto-Indo-European. However, inconsistencies at one level (Basque is classified as Indo-European, although it is jarringly unique) will be compounded at the next, and then again, until any conclusions will eventually bring more hole to the table than cheese. Conventional wisdom pegs the reliable range of reduction techniques at about 6,000 years. Beyond that, coincidence and migration invalidate the results.

And there's the rub. Nostratic and the other macro-family languages would have been spoken about 12,000 years ago. Thus, even conscientiously conducted studies associating Nostratic with Pharaonic Egyptian or modern Latvian are badly compromised from the outset. What's worse, several ice ages have scoured clean the archaeological record prior to 14,500 years ago, denying researchers an important source of clues. For example, if archaeologists find Asian indications among a vanished community's remains, it may have spoken an Asian language. Assumptions of this sort prove nothing, but they can support (or undermine) a linguistic hypothesis. But once archaeology is benched, paleolinguists must navigate the pre-12,000 BCE darkness by their wonky statistics alone.

The copyright of the article Mother Tongue: The Search for the First Language in World Languages is owned by . Permission to republish Mother Tongue: The Search for the First Language in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.