What Language is Telling Us
Language was born by appropriating parts of our brains that we use for complex tool-making. Spoken language made it possible for us to teach more effectively. It allowed us to hunt and gather more efficiently. Language quickly grew and spread because children absorb it and use it so readily.
Language invented stories and songs to better preserve itself. Then it infiltrated our vision system, leveraging our tool-making and tool-using abilities, to be written down on cave walls and clay tablets. Language became semi-permanent; it endured far beyond any individual speaker or group. Once language was written, propagation became much easier and more people learned it. Now language is everywhere and it’s preserved. Language wants to be voluminous and immortal.
Human cultures may at times lose their language for another. Their languages might endure sudden, profound disruptions and slow, meandering erosions. But no culture loses language completely, any more than an ocean would suddenly lose all of its saltiness. Language, it would seem, is now endemic to humans. Language wants to permeate humanity.
Perhaps more than anything, language wants to grow and develop and change. Language is never the same from moment to moment. It wants to become elaborate and sophisticated, and will develop complexities that are nearly ineffable when left alone with an isolated group of devoted speakers. It will expand to fill the considerable human capacity for nuance and intricacy. But language also desperately wants to survive: it will shed every extravagance and decoration in order to be useful to strangers in far-off places. Language seeks to explore and find other species of itself; long-lost relatives. It seeks contact and change and combination. A language will readily bend and blend with the force of another.
Language has co-opted our technology to further develop, grow and move. It has positioned itself to be an intermediary between us and nearly all of our tools. It may eventually become our only tool.
Language might outgrow us, having used us as a stepping stone on the way to the next thing it wants: independence from us.