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The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
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 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.
Theory of language is a topic in philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. [1] ... William James selects "zoölogical evolution", William Croft prefers ...
The monogenetic theory points to a single origin of all of the world's languages and it is the most accepted theory. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It states that all current languages have formed through language change from a single tongue that gradually differentiated into unintelligible languages.
There are many competing theories of how language might have evolved, if indeed it is an evolutionary adaptation. They stem from the belief that language development could result from an adaptation, an exaptation, or a by-product. Genetics also influence the study of the evolution of language.
Dating back to 1821, German linguist August Schleicher was the representative pioneer of biolinguistics, discussing the evolution of language based on Darwin's theory of evolution. Since linguistics had been believed to be a form of historical science under the influence of the Société de Linguistique de Paris , speculations of the origin of ...
In terms of evolutionary theory, historical linguistics (as opposed to research into the origin of language) studies Lamarckian acquired characteristics of languages. This perspective explores how languages adapt and change over time in response to cultural, societal, and environmental factors.