From Zero to Several!?
Humans are unique in their development of language. This is not to say that animals don’t communicate—they absolutely do. (My cats tell me all sorts of things like, “Food. Now!” Or, “Hey, pay attention to me. Hey! Hey!”) And we still have everything to learn about the complex and subtle communication used by whales, elephants and trees. However, the signaling and communication used by animals doesn’t come anywhere near the level of sophistication that humans have achieved. It is generally accepted that animals don’t, for instance, say to each other, “Hey, did you see that thing that washed up on the beach the other day?” (HT: John McWhorter)
There has been a lot of work to try to figure out how language first emerged among humans and what might have caused it. We had already learned how to make fire and probably we were already cooking food over it. Our brains certainly got bigger over time, which helped to enable it, but probably didn’t cause language development. And, by the way, our big brains consume a lot of calories, so the cooking thing is a very big deal: it enabled us to get more calories out of food and not have to spend literally hours every day chewing on stuff that didn’t taste all that good. Some researchers link the origins of language development to the need to teach tool making and tool use to others.
And babies seem to pick it up spoken language pretty reliably even when we don’t try to deliberately teach it to them. Their little spongy brains are, no doubt, evolved to learn such things in that nearly-magical way that helps ensure their survival in the community, along with looking adorable. In any event, it’s a complicated endeavor and it’s a miracle that we can even talk the way we do, much less type words like this.
Consider these things one more time, carefully:
1. No other animal possesses language anywhere near us in terms of complexity.
2. Big brains seem to be a requirement for this, and high caloric intake must support it.
3. Children acquire language without needing explicit instruction.
A question struck me the other day: how on Earth—why on Earth—are we able to learn multiple languages?
It seems highly improbable—almost like discovering that because we evolved to walk upright, we also evolved to walk forward and backward in time. Nature is pretty stingy with innovation: you have to be able to make the payments on anything new you add to the evolutionary mortgage. Our abilities with tools and fire and cooking and walking or running long distances pay off big: we can hunt and gather and power our big brains. Cooperation and coordination are needed in communities to help support all of those activities, and language facilitates that.
But we didn’t have international travel back then. We grew up and lived in groups that stayed together for long periods of time. And we spoke the same language, because that’s what makes language useful.
Why would we have ever needed to learn more than one language? I’m nonplussed.