Monday, June 13, 2011

Africa: the birthplace of all languages!

A new research has abolished the belief that all languages in the world were introduced separately in different regions and epochs. Africa is now considered to be the birthplace of all languages, which are dated 150.000 years back. These are findings after a thorough research, which examined 504 languages, took place in Oxford and Oakland Universities. Language, speech, gave the opportunity to groups of people to migrate to other parts of the world, and eventually leave Africa. 


It is believed that the linguistic development is hidden within the timeless evolution of the sounds within the languages. It is also evident that the age of one language can be identified by the variety of sounds and various special phonemes within the language. That is why African languages have 100 phonemes (which is the smallest segmental unit of  sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances), whilst English, French and German have 45 phonemes each and the language in Hawaii only 13. 
However this new research will create various reactions within the linguistic community, since many support the fact that it is impossible to examine any linguistic form prior to 10.000 years back.    

No comments:

Post a Comment