Sociolinguistics

Language Family and Theories of Language Origin

ANWAR FAZERI
REG. NUMBER: A1B212067
ARIANI
REG. NUMBER: A1B212227
AULIA MUSLIMAH
REG. NUMBER: A1B212046
CATUR BAYU NOVIANTO
REG. NUMBER: A1B212052
CAHYANING FITRA P.
REG. NUMBER: A1B212104

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
FACULTY OF TEACHER TRAINING AND EDUCATION
LAMBUNG MANGKURAT UNIVERSITY
2015
 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background
The study of the origins of languages and their classification into families is traditionally
known as philology. For various reasons it is not possible to be precise about the number of
languages in the world, but most philologists agree that there are between 6,000 - 7,000 living
languages. These languages are divided into about 100 language families; the exact number is
dependent on the classification paradigm. The major language families can be further divided
into groups of languages that are also called families. So, English belongs to the Germanic
family, which in turn is part of the Indo-European family. Clearly, in terms of second language
acquisition, it will generally be easier to learn a new language from the same language family as
the mother tongue than to learn one from a different language family. A German student is
naturally going to have an easier time learning English than a Chinese student.

Moreover, Words are definitely not inborn, but the capacity to acquire and language and use
it creatively seems to be inborn. Noam Chomsky calls this ability the LAD (Language
Acquisition Device). Today we will ask two questions: how did this language instinct in humans
originate? And how did the first language come into being? How did language begin? Words
don’t leave artifacts behind—writing began long after language did—so theories of language
origins have generally been based on hunches. For centuries there had been so much fruitless
speculation over the question of how language began that when the Paris Linguistic Society was
founded in 1866, its bylaws included a ban on any discussions of it. The early theories are now
referred to by the nicknames given to them by language scholars fed up with unsupportable just-
so stories.

In short, the writer tries to link up the relationship between the language family and
language origin by finding the description of what is language family an also the theories of
language origin that led many linguists identify and classify where a certain language belongs to
and how actually a language can be born or created. This paper will give some description also
some theories related to the objects which are family language and family origin.
1.2 Statement of the problem
1. What does the meaning of Language Family?
2. What are the theories of Language Origin?

1.3 Objectives of the study

After learning this paper, readers are expected to be able to:
1. Understand the material about language family.
2. Understand about the theories of language origin.

1.4 Significance of the study

Hopefully, by learning this paper students are able to understand the concept of language
family and also the theories of language origin. Moreover, we hope this paper could help
students in their language study.
 DISCUSSION

2.1. The Language Family

Most languages belong to language families. A language family is a group of related
languages that developed from a common historic ancestor, referred to as protolanguage (proto–
means ‘early’ in Greek). The ancestral language is usually not known directly, but it is possible
to discover many of its features by applying the comparative method that can demonstrate the
family status of many languages. Sometimes a protolanguage can be identified with a historically
known language. Thus, provincial dialects of Vulgar Latin are known to have given rise to the
modern Romance languages, so the *Proto-Romance language is more or less identical to Latin.
Similarly, Old Norse was the ancestor of Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Icelandic.
Sanskrit was the protolanguage of many of the languages of the Indian subcontinent, such
as Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, and Urdu. Further back in time, all these ancestral languages
descended, in turn, from one common ancestor. We call this ancestor *Proto-Indo-European
(PIE). Language families can be subdivided into smaller units called branches. For instance, the
Indo-European family has several branches, among them, Germanic, Romance, and Slavic.
How do linguists establish relationships among languages?
Sometimes it is relatively easy to establish relationships among languages. Let us look at
the Romance languages. We know that Italian is a descendant of Latin, a language that was
spoken in Italy two thousand years ago, and one which left a great number of written documents.
The Roman conquest helped spread Latin throughout Europe where it eventually developed into
regional dialects. When the Roman Empire broke up, these regional dialects evolved into the
modern Romance languages that we know today: French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and
others. These languages form the Romance branch of the Indo-European language family. By
looking at the word for ‘water’ in three Romance languages, one can easily see the similarities
among them.
Italian Acqua
Spanish Agua
Portuguese Agua
What if the ancestral language left no records?
The case with Romance languages is unusually easy because their common ancestor — Latin —
left many written documents. In most cases, however, the ancestral language was not written. As
a result, linguists look at similarities among its modern descendants to establish common origins.
Take a look at these examples:
English Water
German Wasser
Danish Vand
Russian Voda
Polish Woda
Czech Voda
It is clear that the word for ‘water’ looks very similar within each group, but not quite as similar
across groups. Languages in the first group belong to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European
language family. Languages in the second group belong to the Slavic branch. Although there are
no written records of the ancestral *Proto-Germanic or *Proto-Slavic languages, we have to
assume that these two ancestral languages must have existed at some time, just like Latin did.
Where do these mystery languages belong?
Here is the word for ‘water’ in two more languages. Do you think these languages belong to any
of the branches above?
Latvian Udens
Albanian Uje
Basque Ur
As it turns out, Latvian belongs to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language
family, Albanian has no close relatives and does not belong to any of the branches of the Indo-
European language family, and Basque does not belong to any language family at all. In fact, it is
a language isolate, i.e., a language that cannot be reliably assigned to any established language
family.
Read “Exploratorium Magazine Lecture on the Evolution of Language“
What if there are no records, and we know little about the languages?
In many parts of the world, there are no written records, and we don’t know enough about the
languages themselves. Consequently, we have to resort to grouping languages on the basis of
geography. This is the case with many of the aboriginal languages of Australia, the native Indian
languages of the Americas, the tribal languages of Africa, and countless other languages all over
the world.
How many language families are there?
According to Ethnologue (16th edition), there are 147 language families in the world. This figure
may not be precise because of our limited knowledge about many of the languages spoken in the
most linguistically diverse areas of the world such as Africa. The actual number of families, once
these languages are studied and relationships among them are established, will undoubtedly keep
changing.
World’s largest language families
The largest language families (those with over 25 languages) are listed below (Ethnologue).
There are 6,523 languages in this group, and together they account for close to 95 percent of all
world languages (assuming that there are some 6,900 languages in the world). The remaining
families account for only 5 percent of the world languages. In addition, there are 53 languages
considered unclassified.
Here is a list of the 10 major language families (in terms of the number of speakers of those
languages worldwide and/or the number of sub-families/languages they contain.) In each case,
the language family is followed by one of its sub-families, followed by an example of a language
from that sub-family.
 Afro-Asiatic: Semitic - Arabic
 Altaic: Turkic - Turkish
 Austro-Asiatic: Mon-Khmer - Khmer
 Austronesian: Malayo-Polynesian - Tagalog
 Dravidian: Tamil - Kannada
 Indo-European: Germanic - English
 Niger-Congo: Volta-Congo - Dogon
 Sino-Tibetan: Chinese - Mandarin
 Uralic: Finno-Ugric - Hungarian
The following list gives a breakdown of the number of native speakers of the world's major
languages. The numbers themselves are rough estimates but give an accurate picture of the
relative positions of the languages listed. (Sampled 13/02/2007 - all numbers in millions.)
  Mandarin: 885
 Spanish: 332
 English: 322
 Bengali: 189
 Hindi: 182
 Portuguese: 170
 Russian: 170
 Japanese: 125
 German: 98
The Arabic languages are listed separately in the Ethnologue. Together it is estimated that about
220 million people are native speakers of a variety of Arabic.

2.2. The Theories of Language Origin

Concerning the origin of the first language, there are two main hypotheses, or beliefs.
Neither can be proven or disproved given present knowledge.
1) Belief in divine creation.
Many societies throughout history believed that language is the gift of the gods to humans. It
can not be proven that language is as old as humans, but it is definitely true that language and
human society are inseparable. Wherever humans exist language exists. Every stone age tribe
ever encountered has a language equal to English, Latin, or Greek in terms of its expressive
potential and grammatical complexity. Technologies may be complex or simple, but language is
always complex. Charles Darwin noted this fact when he stated that as far as concerns language,
"Shakespeare walks with the Macedonian swineherd, and Plato with the wild savage of Assam."
In fact, it sometimes seems that languages spoken by preindustrial societies are much more
complex grammatically than languages such as English (example: English has about seven tense
forms and three noun genders; Kivunjo, a Bantu language spoken on the slopes of Mount
Kilimanjaro, has 14 tenses and about 20 noun classes.) There are no primitive languages, nor are
any known to have existed in the past--even among the most remote tribes of stone age hunter-
gatherers.
 Nevertheless, it is impossible to prove that the first anatomically modern humans possessed
creative language. It is also impossible to disprove the hypothesis that primitive languages might
have existed at some point in the distant past of Homo sapiens development.
2) Natural evolution hypothesis.
At some point in their evolutionary development humans acquired a more sophisticated
brain which made language invention and learning possible. In other words, at some point in
time humans evolved a language acquisition device, whatever this may be in real physical
terms. The simple vocalizations and gestures inherited from primate ancestors then quickly gave
way to a creative system of language--perhaps within a single generation or two. /Mention the
hypothesis about rewiring the visual cortex of the brain into a language area./ According to the
natural evolution hypothesis, as soon as humans developed the biological, or neurological,
capacity for creative language, the cultural development of some specific system of forms with
meanings would have been an inevitable next step.
This hypothesis cannot be proven either. Archeological evidence unearthed thus far, seems
to indicate that modern humans, Homo sapiens, emerged within the last 150,000 years. By
30,000, BC all other species of humanoids seem to have been supplanted by Homo sapiens.
Could the success of our species vis-a-vis other hominids be explained by its possession of
superior communicative skills? Speaking people could teach, plan, organize, and convey more
sophisticated information. This would have given them unparalleled advantage over hominid
groups without creative language. Of course, no one knows whether other species of humanoids-
-Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalis -- used creative language. Perhaps they also did. In any
case, Homo sapiens, "the wise human," should perhaps really be called Homo loquens, "the
speaking human" because language and humans are everywhere found together, whereas wisdom
among humans is much more selectively distributed.
Moreover, there is an alternative way in conducting language origin, which is invention
hypotheses. Moving on to another question, if humans acquired the capacity for language either
by divine gift or by evolution, then exactly how might humans have devised the first language?
There are several hypotheses as to how language might have been consciously invented by
humans based on a more primitive system of hominid communication. : and its gradual
refinement served as a continuous impetus to additional human mental development. Those
theories or hypothesis are:
1. The bow-wow theory
The idea that speech arose from people imitating the sounds that things make: Bow-wow,
moo, baa, etc. Not likely, since very few things we talk about have characteristic sounds
associated with them, and very few of our words sound anything at all like what they mean. It is
also called as the "bow-wow" hypothesis (the most famous and therefore the most ridiculed
hypothesis) holds that vocabulary developed from imitations of animal noises, such as: Moo,
bark, hiss, meow, quack-quack. In other words, the first human words were a type of index, a
sign whose form is naturally connected with its meaning in time and space.
2. The pooh-pooh theory
The idea that speech comes from the automatic vocal responses to pain, fear, surprise, or
other emotions: a laugh, a shriek, a gasp. But plenty of animals make these kinds of sounds too,
and they didn't end up with language. The "pooh-pooh" theory or hypothesis holds that the
first words came from involuntary exclamations of dislike, hunger, pain, or pleasure, eventually
leading to the expression of more developed ideas and emotions. In this case the first word
would have been an involuntary ha-ha-ha, wa-wa-wa These began to be used to name the actions
which caused these sounds.
The problem with this hypothesis is that, once again, emotional exclamations are a very small
part of any language. They are also highly language specific. For instance, to express sudden
pain or discomfort: Eng. ouch; Russ. oi.; Cherokee eee. Thus, exclamations are more like other
words in that they reflect the phonology of each separate language. Unlike sneezes, tears,
hiccoughs or laughter, which are innate human responses to stimuli, the form of exclamations
depends on language rather than precedes language. Also, exclamations, like most other words
are symbols, showing at least a partially arbitrary relationship between sound and meaning.
3. The ding-dong theory
This theory, favored by Plato and Pythagoras, maintains that speech arose in response to the
essential qualities of objects in the environment. The original sounds people made were
supposedly in harmony with the world around them. The idea that speech reflects some mystical
resonance or harmony connected with things in the world. Unclear how one would investigate
this. In this theory, language began when humans started naming objects, actions and phenomena
after a recognizable sound associated with it in real life. This hypothesis holds that the first
human words were a type of verbal icon, a sign whose form is an exact image of its meaning:
crash became the word for thunder, boom for explosion. Some words in language obviously did
derive from imitation of natural sounds associated with some object: Chinook Indian word for
heart--tun-tun, Basque word for knife: ai-ai (literally ouch-ouch). Each of these iconic words
would derive from an index, a sign whose form is naturally associatied with its meaning in real
space and time.
The problem with this hypothesis is that onomatopoeia (imitation of sound, auditory
iconicity) is a very limited part of the vocabulary of any language; imitative sounds differ from
language to language: Russian: ba-bakh=bang, bukh= thud. Even if onomotopoeia provided the
first dozen or so words, then where did names for the thousands of naturally noiseless concepts
such as rock, sun, sky or love come from?
4. The yo-he-ho theory
The idea that speech started with the rhythmic chants and grunts people used to coordinate
their physical actions when they worked together. There's a pretty big difference between this
kind of thing and what we do most of the time with language. Language developed on the basis
of human cooperative efforts.
The earliest language was chanting to simulate collective effort, whether moving great stones to
block off cave entrances from roving carnivores or repeating warlike phrases to inflame the
fighting spirit.
It is fairly certain that the first poetry and song came from this aspect of beginning speech.
Songs of this type are still with us: Volga boatmen, military marching chants, seven dwarfs
working song.
Plato also believed that language developed out of sheer practical necessity. And Modern
English has the saying: Necessity is the mother of invention. Speech and right hand coordination
are both controlled in the left hemisphere of the brain. Could this be a possible clue that manual
dexterity and the need to communicate developed in unison?
5. The ta-ta theory
The idea that speech came from the use of tongue and mouth gestures to mimic manual
gestures. For example, saying ta-ta is like waving goodbye with your tongue. But most of the
things we talk about do not have characteristic gestures associated with them, much less gestures
you can imitate with the tongue and mouth. Charles Darwin hypothesized (though he himself
was sceptical about his own hypothesis) that speech may have developed as a sort of mouth
pantomime: the organs of speech were used to imitate the gestures of the hand. In other words,
language developed from gestures that began to be imitated by the organs of speech--the first
words were lip icons of hand gestures.
It is very possible that human language, which today is mostly verbal, had its origin in some
system of gestures; other primates rely on gesture as an integral part of communication, so it is
plausible that human communication began in the same way. Human gestures, however, just
like onomotopoeic words, differ from culture to culture. Cf. English crossing the finger for good
luck vs. Russian "fig" gesture; nodding for yes vs. for no in Turkish and Bulgarian; knocking on
wood vs. spitting over the left shoulder three times.
6. The la-la theory
The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen suggested that language may have developed from
sounds associated with love, play, and (especially) song. The idea that speech emerged from the
sounds of inspired playfulness, love, poetic sensibility, and song. This one is lovely, and no more
or less likely than any of the others.
7. Warning hypothesis.
Language may have evolved from warning signals such as those used by animals. Perhaps
language started with a warning to others, such as Look out, Run, or Help to alert members of the
tribe when some lumbering beast was approaching. Other first words could have been hunting
instructions or instructions connected with other work. In other words, the first words were
indexes used during everyday activities and situations.
8. Lying hypothesis.
E. H. Sturtevant argued that, since all real intentions or emotions get involuntarily expressed
by gesture, look or sound, voluntary communication must have been invented for the purpose of
lying or deceiving. He proposed that the need to deceive and lie--to use language in contrast to
reality for selfish ends-- was the social prompting that got language started.
There are no scientific tests to evaluate between these competing hypotheses. All of them seem
equally far-fetched. This is why in the late 19th century the Royal Linguistic Society in London
actually banned discussion and debate on the origin of language out of fear that none of the
arguments had any scientific basis at all and that time would be needlessly wasted on this
fruitless enquiry. Attempts to explain the origin of language are usually taken no more seriously
today either.
 However, the extended use of natural indexes still leaves unexplained the development of
grammar--the patterns in language which have definite structural functions but no specific
meaning. The creative, generative aspect of human language that we call grammar is language's
most unique feature. Where did grammar come from? There is nothing like grammar (patterns
with definite functions yet no set meaning) in animal systems of communication
 CONCLUSION

In this paper we discuss about language family and the theory of origin. The language
family is a group of related languages that developed from a common historic ancestor, referred
to as protolanguage (proto– means ‘early’ in Greek). According to Ethnologue (16th edition),
there are 147 language families in the world. Then, the world has 6,523 languages in group of
Ethnologue. It also has 10 major language families (in terms of the number of speakers of those
languages worldwide and/or the number of sub-families/languages they contain. Each of them
are followed by one sub-family. They are Afro Asiatic: Semitic – Arabic, Altaic: Turkic –
Turkish, Austro-Asiatic: Mon-Khmer – Khmer, Austronesian: Malayo-Polynesian – Tagalog,
Dravidian: Tamil – Kannada, Indo-European: Germanic – English, Niger-Congo: Volta-Congo –
Dogon, Sino-Tibetan: Chinese – Mandarin, and Uralic: Finno-Ugric – Hungarian.
After that, in the theories of language origin, it is divided into two main beliefs, they are
belief in creation and belief of natural evolution. In the belief in divine creation, it refers to the
Genesis 2:20, which tells us that Adam gave names to all living creatures. . This belief
predicates that humans were created from the start with an innate capacity to use language.
Next, in the belief of Natural evolution hypothesis, human evolved a language acquisition devise.
The simple vocalizations and gestures inherited from primate ancestors then quickly gave way to
a creative system of language--perhaps within a single generation or two. According to the
natural evolution hypothesis, as soon as humans developed the biological, or neurological,
capacity for creative language, the cultural development of some specific system of forms with
meanings would have been an inevitable next step. Each hypothesis is predicated on the idea that
the invention of language, those hypothesis are: The bow-wow theory, The pooh-pooh theory,
The ding-dong theory, The yo-he-ho theory, The ta-ta theory, The la-la theory, Warning
hypothesis, Lying hypothesis.
 REFERENCES

http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/langdiff/family.htm
http://aboutworldlanguages.com/language-families
http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test1materials/origin_of_language.htm
http://grammar.about.com/od/il/fl/language-origins-theories.htm