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The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language must draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...
Evolutionary linguistics or Darwinian linguistics is a sociobiological approach to the study of language. [1] [2] Evolutionary linguists consider linguistics as a subfield of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. The approach is also closely linked with evolutionary anthropology, cognitive linguistics and biolinguistics.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, involving analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context.. Language use was first systematically documented in Mesopotamia, with extant lexical lists of the 3rd to the 2nd Millennia BCE, offering glossaries on Sumerian cuneiform usage and meaning, and phonetical vocabularies of foreign languages.
In historical or evolutionary linguistics, monogenesis and polygenesis are two different hypotheses about the phylogenetic origin of human languages. According to monogenesis, human language arose only once in a single community, and all current languages come from the first original tongue. On the other hand, according to the polygenesis ...
Behavioural ecology and dual inheritance theory, the study of gene–culture co-evolution, emphasise the role of culture as a human invention in shaping the genes, rather than vice versa. It is known, for example, that since early humans started developing their language, the process paved way for genetic changes that would affect the vocal tract .
The evolution of languages or history of language includes the evolution, divergence and development of languages throughout time, as reconstructed based on glottochronology, comparative linguistics, written records and other historical linguistics techniques. The origin of language is a hotly contested topic, with some languages tentatively ...
The basis of Noam Chomsky's linguistic theory lies in biolinguistics, the linguistic school that holds that the principles underpinning the structure of language are biologically preset in the human mind and hence genetically inherited. [2] He argues that all humans share the same underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of sociocultural ...
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. [1] Principal concerns of historical linguistics include: [2] [3] to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages. to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and to determine their relatedness, grouping them ...