Benedicto, Hazel

LANGUAGE AND ITS ORIGIN Brucal, Lemuel

De Castro, Aleiah
De Torres, Rhonielyn
WHY DO WE STUDY LANGUAGE?
Language helps us express our feelings, desires, and
queries to everyone. We study language to be able to
communicate easily to others and to develop our 5 key
skills: listening, writing, reading, viewing, and speaking. It
makes it easier to understand one’s culture and beliefs.
HOW DID LANGUAGE BEGIN?
Spoken language probably developed 500 to 1000 centuries ago. However, there’s
no direct evidence about the development of speech and a lot of speculations about
the origins of language, but there are said to be 6 sources of how it began.
These are:
1. The Divine Source
2. The Natural Sound Source
3. The Social Interaction Source
4. The Physical Adaptation Source
5. The Tool-making Source
6. The Genetic Source
THE DIVINE SOURCE
• In
most religions, it is said that a Divine source gives language to
humans.
• Experiments were conducted by people to prove and rediscover
this God-given language.
- The experiment is to let babies grow up in isolation and see if
they automatically learn the language.
THE NATURAL SOUND SOURCE
1. The ‘Bow-wow’ Theory
- Primitive words came from natural sounds early humans heard around them. These words are
called onomatopoeic words and all languages have these. One belief is that human languages
originated from these onomatopoeic words that mimic the sounds of entities or actions to which
they refer.
2. The ‘Pooh-pooh’ Theory
- This theory assumes that words originated from the use of sounds that reflect our emotions
such as fear, pain, surprise, sounds of laughter and crying, etc.
THE SOCIAL INTERACTION SOURCE
The ‘Yo-he-ho’ Theory
- According to this, early humans created sounds in rhythmic chants and
vocalism and might have developed a set of grunts or calls that were uttered
to signal others or provide instructions. Language arose out of calls and signals
when people work together, usually in physical work.
- This can also be part of natural sound source because sounds were used to
communicate with others. However, these were only done during social events.
THE PHYSICAL ADAPTATION SOURCE
Evolutionary biology proposes that human physiology went
through a number of changes due to the environmental
factors and language is a result of these changes. The
physical changes and development might have helped us
being capable of speech.
THE TOOL-MAKING SOURCE
This theory states that as human started making tools they began
to speak as well and why, because the parts of brain used in
language production and constructing or manipulating objects are
very close to each other.

Brain activity is used for language production and making complex

tools, supporting the theory that they evolved at the same time.
THE GENETIC SOURCE
Babies go through almost automatic developments from breathing, learning to
blink, stand up, walk, etc. Even children who are born deaf become fluent
because of a sign language.
This claims that we have a special capacity for language, also known as
Innateness Theory which means that we hold at least some knowledge about
language at birth.
This means that language did not result from a gradual change or process but
happened quickly as a genetic mutation.
REFERENCES:
• https://www.slideshare.net/fahimashuja/the-origin-of-language-59162430
•https://linguisticsunimet.wordpress.com/about/?fbclid=IwAR0QW3iIjAGS8Aj_NEW0
Nau2wLxYbIKrG91NRHVoptgDUnYm4gpfdB36n_8
• https://www.trueorigin.org/language01.php?fbclid=IwAR2j8gyVBnXLblz-uxa3g-
Rb4XBE0BywOKPBoa0ZInDtiGrtFSUKm3x7h3Q
• https://youtu.be/nBFjaHivmlQ