Our Primitive Understanding of Language-Nautilus

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If humans speak for 200,000 years-mostly of the existence of our species, that is to say-then about half a million languages ​​could have been spoken in everything. To put this number in perspective, around 7,000 languages ​​are spoken today. And because the writing was not invented that around 5,000 years ago, the vast majority of these half-million languages ​​are lost to us, having been spoken in a pre-alphabetical world and died before they could be recorded. It is a half-million knowledge distinct systems, including stories, myths, songs, pharmacopoeia, recipes, jokes, prayers and swears that have disappeared in oblivion. (It is possible that some of the first languages ​​were signed rather than spoken.)

Even if this number is deactivated, which could be due to the fact that researchers do not agree on the moment when humans have started to speak – some maintain that it was about 100,000 years ago, others who speak of our species – we can be convinced that the number of languages ​​that have ever been spoken to swim on those who are spoken today. I find it dizzying and – I can’t help it – tragic. Think of all these ways of knowing and doing that have been invented and lost, only – in some cases – to be invented again. Think of all these gossip!

But it also has fairly amazing implications for our understanding of language. This means that modern languages ​​probably represent less than 2% of the complete linguistic range of humanity, and a non -random sample for this – a strongly formal form, for example, by Western imperialism. And it gets worse. Maybe only 10% of languages ​​represent that 2% are well documented. When you consider that linguists continue to record previously unregistered languages ​​and discover new linguistic characteristics in the process – as they do today in Papua New Guinea, for example – you realize how much we know little rigor about what the language is and what it does.

At the turn of the 14th century, when Latin had already died, except as the language of academics and priests, a Tuscan writer called Dante Alighieri observed that many words were almost identical in Romance languages. He then made the frankly heretical suggestion that it was because the different flavors of the romance were all descending from the Latin. At the time, in Europe, there was no concept of language evolution. The Bible argued that linguistic diversity and its corollary perplexity, mutual, was the punishment visited on humanity by God for the impertinent construction of the Babel tower – and medieval Europeans have literally took the Bible.

Living languages ​​probably represent less than 2% of the complete linguistic range of humanity.

For the contemporaries of Dante, the language was static until God said the opposite. Dante argued that Al Converse,, Languages ​​change infinitely all the time. It was like a person who grew up, he explained: a baby becomes a child becomes a man. People had no trouble grasping this even if they did not perceive the baby who was transformed before their eyes. Unfortunately, despite all his literary plume, the famous author of Divine comedy found himself ignored on this point.

It took people for two centuries to accept that languages ​​change. Even today, although most people easily recognize linguistic evolution, some are reluctant to the idea that their own language is in a state of flow. And yet, although this flow is strongly dependent on the context, and occurs at different rates in different languages, it is undoubtedly real.

A way in which all languages ​​change is simply done by the young children who learn them. It is a problem of loyalty: by reproducing what they hear, infants unconsciously introduce tiny deviations from the model presented to them. But people can also deliberately innovate, using a foreign word or grammatical construction, or by imitating an accent. They could do it because they want to look like someone else, or for the opposite reason – to distinguish themselves from the other to the exotic sound.

These opposite forces have worked throughout the existence of our species, and the result is that languages ​​and dialects have diverged and divided, but also, sometimes, converged. The resulting branches and mergers reflect the journey of language around the world – the different communities of discourse that its speakers have encountered and their receptivity, or otherwise, to these communities.

You can therefore think of a language as a kind of chronicle of the past, but a compound collectively and largely unconsciously. By moving on the internal functioning of the language, historical linguists can “read” this chronicle. This revelation was a balm in my soul, after the previous one that most languages ​​are lost for us, because it means that we can recover part of our unwritten past. Linguists can reconstruct the prehistory of modern languages, to a certain extent, and even the dead ancestors of these languages. However, they can only do it up to around 10,000 years, because beyond this threshold, the data becomes so rare that it is difficult to distinguish the different forces that shape a language – to tell a loan of the inheritance, let’s say.

This leaves an impenetrable black box at least 190,000 years. It’s always dizzying, I would say. Always tragic.

Image of lead: Kitohodka / Shutterstock

• Laura Spinney

  Published on June 30, 2025

  Laura Spinney is a writer and scientific journalist. His writing on science appeared in The Guardian, The Economist, Nature And National Geographicamong others. She is the author of two novels, The doctor (2001) and The fast (2007), and a collection of oral history, Central street (2013). His best-selling non-fiction account of the 1918 influenza pandemic, Pale rider: the Spanish flu of 1918 and how she changed the world (2017), was translated in more than 20 languages. His latest book, Proto: how once an ancient language has become globalThe history of Indo-European languages ​​appeared in 2025. She lives in Paris.