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All living species exchange the information they need to survive.

Animals transmit a host of messages understood by their kind or by members of other species.

Most carnivores mark their territory to intimidate possible intruders.

Birds have many courting rituals to seduce a mate.

Of all the forms of communication, there is one that only human beings use: language.

Language is a communication system so sophisticated that it can express everything from the most basic needs to the most

complex concepts. Words can describe things which are not present and even if necessary, things that do not exist.

We utter thousands of words each day without even realizing that talking is truly a remarkable activity.

Human beings have used speech for tens of thousands of years, but no one knows precisely when our ancestors first began to try
to talk. We can only guess.

It's very difficult to say how long people have been using language, for very obvious reason that we have no records prior to

written records, which only go back a few thousand years. Obviously, people have been using language for something like 60,000

years, or maybe 100,000 years. But we have no way of knowing. There were no tape recorders in those days, unfortunately.

How did our ancestors move from communicating like the animals to developing something as complex as human speech? This

mystery has never been solved.

The idea that we start out with a few words as discrete, separate elements and then we learn to make verbs, and then we learn

different kinds of communicative activities that gesture preceded words, and that there's a complicated evolutionary path from

very simple speech to more complex speech. That would be the gradualist evolutionary view.

The emergentist view is that, in fact, animals had a number of abilities which they simply couldn't use in a linguistic way until
something happened, namely the vocal tract changed in animals. And suddenly, speech was possible in a very refined, modulated

way. And then they could put that together with their ability to cognitively separate objects and create complex thoughts.

As humans evolved, the larynx moved down into the throat. This is what made it possible for us to produce articulated sounds.

Because of this peculiar position of the larynx, food can accidentally entered the trachea. As a result, human beings are the only

animals that can die of suffocation while eating.

Language allowed Homo sapiens to transmit stored knowledge and new discoveries from generation to generation. As a result, the

species evolved remarkably quickly.

For instance, the use of speech probably made it easier to learn to make and use increasingly sophisticated tools.

Did our ancestors all speak a common language, a sort of mother tongue of all existing languages? Some researchers believe so,

and think it goes back to cro-magnon man. Others hold the view that language appeared simultaneously in several locations.

The more primitive a society is, the more it differs from its neighbors. So we must conclude that prehistoric humans had highly

diverse modes of linguistic expression. And that the more they gathered into large units of civilization, like empires or states, the

more standardized they became. And the more distinctive models were adopted and spread.
There is a very ancient legend that tries to explain how several languages emerged from the single language that God gave

humanity. It is the story of the Tower of Babel.

The king of Babylon ordered the construction of a huge tower that was to reach onto heaven. And the tower grew so high that it

took a laborer a year to carry bricks from the foot of the tower to the top. And then, to punish the king for his pride, God sent a

host of languages down to earth. The laborers could no longer understand each other, so work on the tower was abandoned.

Perhaps humankind has never had a common language, but one language spoken by an obscure tribe living on the Russian steps

more than 5,000 years ago may well be the root of many languages still spoken today.

The Proto-Indo-European was the ancestor of the languages, most of the languages that are spoken in Europe now. All the romance

languages, such as Italian and French and Spanish.

All the Germanic languages, such as English, German, Dutch, and Danish, Norwegian.

All the Slavic languages, Russian, and all the languages from that group. And also, some language in Persia, now Iran. And in India,

Hindi.

It was when European scholars of the 18th century visited India that they discovered the kinship and vocabulary between the local
languages and the ancient tongues spoken in Europe. All these languages seemed to have their roots in a common ancestor, Indo-

European.

They were able to determine where a language originated when they realized that if certain words appeared regularly, like bear,

for instance, or beech tree, that the language came from a region where there used to be bears or beech trees. By cross checking

like this, gradually they were able to locate roughly the region where this language came from.

The Indo-Europeans were probably semi-nomadic warriors. They left Russia and gradually spread into Asia and throughout Europe.

They gave birth to the Slavs, the Teutons, the Celts and the Italic peoples. The latter were the ancestors of the Romans and

developed a language that was to become one of the most influential in the ancient world: Latin.

Latin is a very particular language. Because today we consider it a learned tongue. The language of science, of culture. In fact,
originally, it was the language of the poor, lowly peasants who had settled in the center of the Italian Peninsula.

However, those lonely peasants, the Romans, proved to be formidable soldiers.

As the Roman legions settled in the lands they conquered, Latin spread throughout the Western world.

In every country where Romans settled, its people wanted to climb the new social ladder. Since Roman society was much wealthier

and more powerful than the societies it had conquered, Rome didn't actually impose Latin. But it was somehow considered an

advantage for people to speak it. But the Latin they spoke varied somewhat from region to region.

Greece, among the first Roman conquests, was one of the few civilizations that did not adopt Latin. Instead, the Roman conquerors

were the ones who borrowed several elements of Greek culture, which they greatly admired. Roman children even had Greek

slaves as tutors. This is why the culture that soon spread throughout all of Europe is called Greco-Roman.

Latin was influenced by Greek and gradually became the first international language.

The blending of Latin with the languages already spoken by some conquered peoples gave birth to a new family of languages.
We all know that when we learn a foreign language, we pronounce it in a slightly different way. And that languages borrow

extensively from each other. That is how the so-called romance languages were born, the languages that stem from Latin.

In Gael, a new language developed, which was neither entirely Gaelic, nor entirely Latin.

People thought they were still speaking Latin. But in fact, they were already starting to speak old French. And who noticed that this

Latinet tongue was no longer entirely Latin? It was Charlemagne.

Charlemagne spoke Frankish, a Germanic language and loved Latin. He heard Parisians for instance, speaking in a certain way and

suddenly realized that they had completely forgotten Latin. So what did he do? He sent to England for a very scholarly Monk

named Alcuin to reteach Latin to these poor French people who had completely forgotten it.

However, Latin was still taught only to clerks, scholars, and those in religious orders. Among the general population, French

continued to grow and change.

Europe in the Middle Ages was a place of great linguistic diversity. Several dialects were used in the various regions that constitute

France today. Around the end of the 10th century, la langue d'oil, a northern French dialect spoken in Paris, became the language

of kings. Through military conquests, d'oil gradually gained sway throughout the whole kingdom to become what we know as

French.

In Spain, it was Castilian spoken in Madrid, which became Spanish.

In Italy, the victory of Tuscan, a northern dialect, was not won by force of arms, it was thanks to the influence of three great

Florentine writers of the 15th century: Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio that Tuscan became the language of the elite.

English appeared in the same period as the romance languages. In the fifth century, England was inhabited by the Celts, who were

displaced by the arrival of Germanic tribes from the continent.

These Germanic tribes came over and decided it was a good place to settle, and they settled in England particularly. These are the

Angles and the Saxons that gave rise to the notion of the language being called Anglo-Saxon. It's sometimes known as Old English
now by scholars.

A little later, another Germanic groups arrived. This time from Scandinavia. They were called Vikings. The Vikings from these

Scandinavian countries spoke Germanic languages. English was strongly influenced by these northern Germanic languages. For

instance, the verbs to get, to give, and the word egg, are of Scandinavian, not Anglo-Saxon origin. We know this because if they

had been Saxon, they would not have had a hard G, but a yuh.

For instance, in English we see yesterday, not gesterday.

The Vikings were not alone in leaving their mark on the Anglo-Saxon tongue. French also had a strong influence on English. With

the arrival in 1066 of a king come from France to take possession of the English throne.

William the Conqueror arrived. He became King of England. His whole court spoke first Norman, and then French. And French

became the language of the aristocracy, and of the people that counted in English society for several centuries.

The French influence can be seen among other places in terms for food. As only Nobles could afford to eat meat, the words for

prepared meat are borrowed from the French. While the words for animals on the hoof as it were, remained very English. So the

French veau becomes veal, which comes from a calf. The French mouton is mutton on the plate, but sheep in the field.
It took three centuries until Henry the IV came to the throne for the King of England once more to have English as his mother

tongue. It was during this period that English began to become standardized.

During Shakespeare's time, it was still in a process of settling down. So Shakespeare had a very varied choice and also, it was a

time when many-- it was possible to create new words and to bring new words adapted from Latin or from French or from other

languages into the language. And Shakespeare was a great inventor of those. And many of the words are first recorded in his

works.

Now of course, that doesn't mean to say that he actually made them up. But he was the one who gets credit for having the first

record of them. So there was a great variety in Shakespeare's language at that time. And he took full advantage of it.

Elizabeth's reign saw the birth of a truly English literature and culture. However, English still had little influence abroad.

At that time, and for several subsequent centuries, it was French culture that held sway over all Europe.

French was the language in every embassy. It was even spoken in Sweden and at the court of the czar of Russia.

But the domination of French was threatened. The languages of other colonial powers, like Spain, Portugal, and England spread

further and further throughout the world.

So that it can exploit its power, every colonial and administration tries to impose its forms of government, laws, culture,
commercial practices, and of course, language. This has had a disastrous impact on indigenous languages around the world.

Thousands of languages have disappeared, and thousands more will very soon be gone.

With the expansion of the British empire on which it was said the sun never sets, English extended its sphere of influence in the

world. It gradually attained the status of international lingua franca it enjoys today.

All the languages spoken in the world today can be grouped into a few large families.

In Europe and America, there are four great Indo-European languages, which with those spoken by the American Indians, make up

the basic American languages. They are French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese. That is an important Indo-European family.

There is the Hamito-Semitic family, which includes Hebrew, the language of the bible, and Arabic. And of course, many others.

And there are other families of languages like Turco-Mongolian, or the African, or Amerindian languages, which belonged to

entirely different families.

Our planet numbers nearly 250 nation states. But the world holds many more languages than that.

There are an estimated 3,000 to 6,000 languages spoken today. It is virtually impossible to arrive at a more precise figure because

it is hard to make a clear distinction between a language and a dialect.

Generally, a language is defined as a dialect with a standardized system of writing that is taught in school and used for

administrative purposes. But it seems that in practice, the geopolitical factors are what make the difference between a language

and a dialect. It is often said that a language is merely a dialect with an army behind it.

Dialect may be associated with the governmental power, or with a real army, so that it dominates a society. And very often, there

are languages that are called different languages, but they're really just different dialects.

Why are they called different languages? Because there's a different government involved. So Norwegian and Danish and Swedish

are rather close to each other, but because they're different countries, they're called different languages.
Often, language is an important symbol for a nation. India is the exception that proves the rule. India recognizes no less than 18

official languages. While Hindi and English are the most commonly used in official communications, many languages are used in

daily life.

When you are in a state of Southern India, like Andhra Pradesh, no one speaks Hindi. They speak Telugu. Schooling is in Telugu,

the major papers, dailies, magazines, and so forth are in Telugu. That makes some 60 million people who speak Telugu, the

equivalent of a large European country. Advertising, signs on stores, everything around you is in Telugu. Occasionally, you see

something in English or Hindi. Car license plates, signs in stations, sometimes on major highways and so on.

In all, more than 400 languages are spoken in India. Some by only a few thousand people isolated in remote regions.

But in this communication age, languages that are not taught or used by the media have a tendency to disappear.

People in an older, traditional society speak only their language. Their children go to school and are bilingual. Their grandchildren

are unilingual because their bilingual parents see no point in teaching them their grandparents' language. So they learn only the

language they are taught at school, the state language. And in three generations, they move from their native language, their

local, tribal, ethnic language, whatever you want to call it, to the language of the state, which becomes supreme in every area.

The immense variety of languages and dialects spoken in the world is not limited to mere differences in form.

In many societies, writing is much less important than ours, and one of the characteristics of societies that are non-literate is that

people who are older will tend to know more than people who are younger. And this makes a big difference in terms of social

relations. So in many societies, being old is to be a repository of wisdom. Whereas in literate societies, older people aren't always

thought of in that way.

Words convey the cultural and historical inheritance of a people. They reflect distinctive values and a host of realities.

For instance, the Inuit have many words for snow. Falling snow, snow that is packed, light, granular, or hardened like ice. They

need all these words because the snow is both the surface they travel on and their building material. Snow conditions also have an

affect on how certain animals travel on the hunting grounds.

One of my colleagues was in Japan and a truck cut in dangerously close to his taxi. The taxi driver bellowed something at the truck

driver. My colleague learned later that all he had yelled was that's dangerous with no polite formulation, which was a total insult in

Japanese.

In Japan, you pare down if you want to insult. In French cultures, particularly in Quebec, if you want to insult someone, you add a

long list of epithets.

The most widely used language in the world is Chinese with more than one billion speakers. But that is not enough to make it an

international language. The first ranking international language is English. More than 800 million people speak it as their mother

tongue, or their second language. More than 80 countries use it as their official language, or their second language.

It's not an accident, I think, that English has become so widely spoken because of the political importance of the United States at

the present day. And so the combination of the earlier political power of the British empire and the contemporary power of United

States at the moment, make English a very dominant language.

One of the great questions about language is whether it is in-born or learned. Are all human beings genetically programmed for

speaking? Or, do they have to learn? And if they don't learn, will they never be able to speak?
Language ability is like a seed inside of a human being, which when other people start speaking, it's like dropping water on a seed

for a tree. When other people start speaking, that language ability starts to grow.

A human baby is one of the most vulnerable of all creatures at birth. It needs others for its physical and emotional survival.

Learning language is one way for the baby to build relations with the world around it.

Instinctively, a mother talking to her baby speaks gently and with longer pauses. This way of communication is intended to attract

the baby's attention and help it understand the concepts of approval, prohibition, and questions.

Certain sounds are easier for them to produce than other sounds. One of the easiest kinds of sounds to produce is when you put

your lips together and then release them. So you get sounds such as pa or ba or ma. And it seems to be more than a coincidence

that in many, many languages of the world, unrelated languages, the words for primary caretakers are words such as papa, baba,

mama.

There is still one mystery. How do babies learn to recognize all the subtlety that lurks in certain sounds?

A friend of mine did a-- in fact, a student of mine did a tremendous study of the word uh-oh. It's one of the most complicated words

you can imagine. It's not really a word, but it has a very distinctive meaning because it implies that you expect one thing and

something else happens. So the whole notion of imagination gets built into the simple expression, uh-oh.

Very young children can make abstract connections between two different concepts with a single word. For example, a child 18

months old who sees its father's glasses and doesn't say glasses, but dada.

Children learning to speak learn hundreds of words in a very short time. This would be beyond the reach of most adults. Even very

young children understand the basic grammatical rules of the language spoken around them.

This is something I had studied myself to find out whether it would work out that way. And sure enough at the two word stage, an

English kid will say, throw ball, and a German child will basically say, ball throw. And they're getting a different structure by the
time they're at two words. And they've picked up the fundamental structure of their language at that two word stage.

For adults, as for children, language fills very important social functions. The fact of sharing a language, a dialect, or even an
accent makes as part of our group. But language can also exclude people.

Language prejudice is as much a problem, or can be as much a problem, as race prejudice. It becomes a way of judging somebody

in just a few seconds. If all dialects are the same, then we should respect them all equally. But what we know is that people make

very quick, rapid and emotional determinations of what they think of another person by how they speak.

The codes, the rules, the vocabularies used, everything that in language allows us to identify ourselves with a group, is also what

allows us to exclude others.

That is what young people do when they use slang that changes so quickly that people not in the gang find it practically impossible

to learn. It is one of the fastest changing dialects in existence.

If you're not a member of the group, you will not know what the latest expressions are. And so you frequently find, particularly

older people, attempting to sound like younger people using expressions that the younger people no longer would be found dead

using.

Our language level changes, sometimes unconsciously, to adapt to life's different circumstances.
We speak differently to different people. We speak differently depending upon whether we're in an informal situation with our

friends, or on a more formal situation with people we know less well. We speak differently when we're speaking to someone who's

in a superior position to us or a person's who's older than us, then to somebody who's in an inferior position, or somebody who's

younger, or to our peers and so on. There's a great variety in the ways in which we speak.

Most languages reflect not only facets of the culture, but also of course, a whole element of social hierarchy. French provides a

very clear example with the use of the formal form, [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. When do you use [UNINTELLIGIBLE] and when do you use,

[INAUDIBLE], the more familiar form? These rules vary a great deal from one region to another, and from one generation to

another as well.

In every culture, communication with other people also depends on body language. How far away do you stand? What is your face

expressing? And your hand movements? These all tell a great deal about the emotions felt by people in conversation.

But without words, human beings cannot express all the subtleties of what they are thinking. They are bound by their silence.

The need to communicate is so deeply rooted in human beings that we have invented a sign language for the deaf. A language so

rich it can express even the most complex ideas.

Human beings have been talking for tens of thousands of years. But although speech passes the test of time, languages die. Since

words express activities and ideas that are constantly changing, languages must also change.

This change occurs more slowly among isolated groups and more quickly among people in touch with other cultures. The lifespan

of a language varies greatly. Some, like Hebrew, Latin, Egyptian, Sanskrit, and Chinese have reached the venerable age of 2,000

years. While others last barely 300 years.

When enough people in a given society become bilingual, the traditional language often gradually disappears. New generations

abandon it in favor of the majority language, which provides access to the modern world.

Obviously, when a language reigns supreme, as English does now, with almost all international communication taking place in

English, many other languages are very seriously threatened. Estimates say that if language is continued to disappear at the

current rate, some 90% of the world's languages today will be gone in 50 to 70 years.

Can a dying language be saved? In Israel, Jewish settlers have literally resuscitated a language that died centuries ago. Hebrew

has once again become a language in everyday use, a language used in the street. But most attempts of this sort are doomed to

failure.

If you have to learn a language as though it were your second language because you didn't learn it when you were very young, it

is enormously difficult. It demands tremendous effort and you will never be as accurate as you wish to be. The only way to really

reestablish a language is to make sure that children learn it as their mother tongue. But to do that, there have to be people around

them who speak it perfectly naturally.

If we spoke fewer languages, communication between peoples would be easier.

In the era of the global village and instant communications, a common language may seem desirable. A universal language is not a

new idea.

In 1887, the Polish physician Ludwig Zamenhof invented Esperanto.

Based on the roots of words common to the main European languages, Esperanto has few rules and is easy to learn. But it is an

artificial creation, which never took root because it has no connection with daily life. It takes strong social pressure to replace one's

mother tongue with another.

Since the Tower of Babel, humans have spoken many languages. And the day when we all use a universal language will probably

never dawn.

But perhaps by the middle of the 21st century, there will only be 100 languages spoken on this planet.

There are serious consequences when languages die. We are enriched by our different societies. They need their different

languages to survive. Every language brings a whole body of knowledge with it.

Language gives us a way of seeing the world and understanding. If we lose the words to express ourselves, we may well lose all

that. It is hard to predict how languages will evolve. But one thing is certain. Human beings have always been able to adapt. If in

the future, we lack the words to express the world around us, chances are we'll invent the words we need.