Five Theories on the Origins of Language What was the first language? How did language begin- where and when? Until recently, a sensible linguist would likely respond to such questions with a shrug and a sigh. As Bernard Campbell states flatly in Humankind Emerging (Allyn Bacon, 2005), We simply do not know, and never will, how or when language began. Its hard to imagine a cultural phenomenon thats more important than the development of language. And yet no human attribute offers less conclusive evidence regarding its origins. The mystery, says Christine Kenneally in her book The First Word, lies in the nature of the spoken word: For all its power to wound and seduce, speech is our most ephemeral creation; it is little more than air. It exits the body as a series of puffs and dissipates quickly into the atmosphere... There are no verbs preserved in amber, no ossified nouns, and no prehistorical shrieks forever spread-eagled in the lava that took them by surprise.
