World book heritage. 11: Language

World Book heritage A series of talks on the history of the written word 11. Language.

Any survey of our written heritage through script to print to the digital record, however superficial it may be, must take language into consideration. Without language there would be no script, and it does place in its full context the impact of the written record across the millennia. Both language and script, whatever their precise origins, reflect the fact that human society has reached a level of complexity, both intellectual and technological, to require firstly the verbal exchange of ideas and information and secondly their recording in a permanent form.

When homo sapiens began to codify their vocal sounds into a coherent stream of words has been the subject of as much discussion as their use of tools and the emergence of our own sub-species of hominids. Tools have been used by hominids for at more than 1,000,000 years, and indeed are used by other primates and even other branches of the animal kingdom, both birds and mammals. It is generally agreed that homo sapiens evolved in eastern central Africa between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago (300-200kya). Geneticists have postulated migrations into western and southern Africa between 150 and 120kya. They have also suggested early migrations into Eurasia but these appear to have left no permanent trace. Developments in tool technology, activities such as ochre processing and the emergence of rock art in the Blomberg Cave in South Africa dated to 100-70kya strongly imply that advanced speech would have evolved in Africa by then. By 100kya homo sapiens had migrated to north Africa, bringing language with them, in advance of a migration along the southern coasts of Arabia and Asia as far as Australia around 65kya. This was followed by a migration through a northern route into western Asia in about 50kya. This group split into two with some turning west into southern Europe about 45kya and others continuing east to reach south-east Asia at about the same time. Groups then continued north into the plains of central Asia by about 30kya and to the circumpolar area of the far north-east of Asia by 25kya. The rise in temperature permitted migration across the Bering Straits around 18kya and the southern tip of Patagonia had been reached by 14kya. Northern Europe was settled by migrants mainly from the steppes of western Asia about 40-30kya. The British Isles was only permanently settled after the retreat of the icecaps around 15kya. This most invasive of species had finally spread across the globe. Only outlying islands such as Greenland (4kya), Polynesia (4-1kya), Madagascar (2kya), and Iceland (1kya) and remained to be settled.

Of course this is an oversimplification; later migrations would displace, obliterate or merge with earlier ones. There is even evidence of interbreeding with Neanderthal hominids in southern Europe. When it comes to correlating the genetic and archaeological evidence with the linguistic evidence, the situation becomes even more complex.

Firstly there is the definition of what constitutes a distinct language. When is a dialect so unintelligible that it has to be considered a distinct language? In western Europe there are language continua, where spoken languages do not stop at political or administrative boundaries but gently merge, rainbow-like. Spoken continental West Germanic changes from Dutch through Flemish, Luxembourgeois Plattdeutsch, Middle (standard) German to the High German of Bavaria, Switzerland and Austria. The Romance languages pass from the Italian dialects, such as Sardinian, through Provencal, French, Occitan, Catalan, Castilian and Galician to Portuguese. Then there is the presence of pidgin or creole languages – indeed it could be argued that modern English is a creole language, Old English having changed its structure and enlarged its vocabulary through contact with Norman French. It is no wonder therefore that the number of languages spoken today is impossible to estimate. David Crystal says that, while most reference books give figures of 5,000 to 6,000, estimates have varied from 3,000 to 10,000. Two recent listings of numbers of speakers of different languages give totals of 7,111 and 8,494, many of which are at risk of dying out.

Even when numbers of languages are ascertained, the establishment of relationships within language families is bedeviled by controversy. While it is possible to compare related languages and recreate a proto-language using such linguistic techniques as glottochronology, these reconstructions rarely take the story back much further than 6,000 years, much more recent than most of the migration periods mentioned above. Attempts to group proto-languages and arrive at a word proto-language are highly speculative and run up against the problem of statistical error as there are only a relatively limited range of consonants and vowels to compare.

The table which follows attempts to reconcile the major early migrations with the major language families. This does not necessarily imply that adjacent language families are related, nor indeed that just as mammals and primates are seen as the culminating point of the tree of life, the English language is the culminating point of the linguistic tree.

It is intended to develop this tree to show the earliest written records of the major languages and when they first appeared in print as a way of charting the story of our written heritage.

1 Africa homeland 200kya

11 Southern Africa migration 150kya
110 Khoi-San
111 Khoe
112 K'Xa
113 Tuu

12 Central Africa migration 140kya
[Pygmies – original language lost]

13 West Central Africa migration 130kya
130 Niger-Congo
131 Benue-Congo: Bantu proto-language 4kya
132 Kwa
133 Adamawa-Ubangi
134 Gur
135 Atlantic
136 Mande
137 Kordofanian

14 Western Africa migration 120kya
140 Nilo-Saharan
141 Chari-Nile
142 Nilotic

2 Northern Africa migration 100kya
21 Afroasiatic proto-language 12/18kya
211 Berber proto-language 10kya
212 Omotic
213 Hamitic
214 Semitic proto-language 6kya
2141 Akkadian
2142 Aramaic
2143 Hebrew
2144 Arabic

215 Southern Europe migration 45kya
2151 Linear A?
2152 Basque?

216 Western Asia migration 40kya
2161 North Caucasian
2162 South Caucasian (Kartvelian)

22 South India migration 65kya
221 Dravidian: Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam

23 Oceania migration 65kya
231 Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) 4kya
2311 Formosan
2312 Eastern
2313 Central
2314 Western (Malagasy)

232 Indo-Pacific (Papuan)

233 Australia (Pama-Nyungan) proto-language 6kya

24 East Asia migration 45Kya
240 Sino-Tibetan
241 Chinese
242 Tibeto-Burman
243 Miao-Yao

25 South East Asia migration 40kya
251 Austroasiatic
2511 Mon-Khmer
2512 Munda,br /> 2513 Nicobarese

252 Thai-Kadai

26 Japan migration 35kya
261 Japanese
262 Korean
263 Ainu

3 Northern Asia migration 40kya
31 Altaic
311 Mongolian: Mongol, Buryat
312 Turkic: Turkish, Azerbaijani, Uzbec, Uighur
313 Tungusic

32 Uralic 7kya
321 Finno-Ugric: Finnish, Estonian, Sami, Hungarian
322 Samoyedic

32 Circumpolar migration 25kya
320 Palaeo-Siberian
321 Yukaghir
322 Chukchi-Kamchatkan
323 Nivk/Gilyak
324 Yenisei
325 Eskimo-Aleut

33 America migration 18kya
330 Amerindian (many subgroups - may be separately listed)

5 Northern European migration 40kya
50 Indo-European proto-language 7kya
51 Anatolian: Hittite
52 Tocharian: Tocharian A and B
53 Armenian
54 Greek
55 Albanian
56 Indo-Iranian (many subgroups - may be separately listed)
57 Balto-Slavic
571 Baltic
5711 West Baltic: Old Prussian
5712 East Baltic: Latvian, Lithuanian
572 Slavic
5721 East Slavic: Russian, Byelorussian, Ukrainian
5722 West Slavic: Polish, Kashubian, Polabian, Sorbian, Czech, Slovak
5723 South Slavic: Old Church Slavonic, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Bulgarian

58 Italo-Celtic
581 Celtic
5811 Goidelic: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx
5812 Brythonic: Breton, Welsh, Cornish
582 Italic
5821 Osco-Umbrian
5822 Faliscan
5823 Latin
5824 Romance (Low Latin): Rumanian, Italian, Sardinian, Dalmatian, Romansch, French, Occitan, Catalan, Spanish (Castilian), Galician, Portuguese

59 Germanic
591 East Germanic: Gothic
592 North Germanic: Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, Icelandic
593 West Germanic: German, Dutch, Frisian, English

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This page last updated 2 August 2020