When did humans develop language? + How whistle languages work
When language evolved, how whistled languages work, and what alien languages might be like. Here’s what happened this week in language and linguistics.
Welcome to this week’s edition of Discovery Dispatch, a weekly roundup of the latest language-related news, research in linguistics, interesting reads from the week, and newest books and other media dealing with language and linguistics.
🆕 New from Linguistic Discovery
This week's content from Linguistic Discovery.
whistle speech
The latest issue of Babel: The Language Magazine has a fantastic article about whistle speech written by high schooler / secondary school student Benjamin Hong, as part of Babel’s Young Writers Competition. I wrote a quick thread based on the article for social media, but here it is in prose form:
There are over 80 whistle languages in the world.
Whistle languages are usually just a whistled version of a specific spoken language. For example, Silbo Gomero is a whistled form of Spanish used in the Canary Islands.
Whistle languages fall into two main types:
In tonal languages, the pitch (melody) with which you say a word changes its meaning. Whistle languages that are based on tonal languages therefore typically just mimic the pitch of each word with the whistle. Different consonants are often distinguished by the length of pauses between whistles.
For non-tonal languages, the corresponding whistles are based on the acoustic profile of each type of sound in the language. Whistlers whistle at specific pitches that correspond to each vowel or consonant in the language.
For example, in Silbo Gomero, the tongue is placed in a similar shape as when pronouncing each spoken sound, giving the whistle a similar pitch. In whistled Turkish, /o/ is whistled at a lower frequency than /a/.
Read the entire article about whistle speech in Babel: The Language Magazine.
📰 In the News
Language and linguistics in the news.
Indigenous languages at Yale
Yale University has added more indigenous languages to their curriculum via their Directed Independent Study Language program (DILS). DILS is a great program because it allows students to pursue languages not formally offered through Yale’s curriculum, by arranging structured one-on-one sessions with native or fluent speakers known as Language Partners. As Yale Daily News states:
The program has become a lifeline for students looking to reconnect with their heritage, preserve endangered tongues and engage in scholarship that would otherwise be impossible without linguistic access.
The way that students work with their Language Partners is similar to what’s known as the Master-Apprentice method in language revitalization, which has been incredibly effective in the communities where it’s been implemented. So I’m very excited to see this development at Yale, and hope that other universities may follow suit.
More reporting here:
Yale adds new Indigenous, endangered languages to DILS program (Yale Daily News)
🗞️ Current Linguistics
Recently published research in linguistics.
Humans developed language by 135,000 ya
One of the most hotly debated questions in the history of linguistics is how language evolved, and a crucial component of answering that question involves knowing when it evolved.
Some scholars believe that language evolved because of a specific genetic adaptation that is unique to humans—the nativist position. Nativists thus expect that language would have appeared relatively suddenly in evolutionary terms, likely correlating with the onset of a Great Leap Forward or Upper Paleolithic Revolution ca. 50,000 ya, when the archaeological record is shows an explosion of symbolic, technological, and artistic behavior. This is the point at which humans reached behavioral modernity.
A major difficulty with this timing, however, is that humanity had already spread throughout Europe and South Asia by 50,000 ya and was no longer a single coherent population. If language had evolved at a point after humanity’s populations diverged, we would expect to see different human populations with different degrees of language abilities. But the fact that all humans share the same capacity for language and that language works the same way for all of us shows that Homo sapiens must have had the capacity for language before the species diverged. In addition, evidence increasingly points to the fact that the cultural shift to behavioral modernity was actually a gradual process, with some features appearing among African populations as early as 300,00 ya (Kissel & Fuentes 2018; Scerri & Will 2023).
Other scholars believe that language emerged gradually as various Homo species developed increasingly sophisticated cognitive abilities, none of which are specific to language. This functionalist position holds that language merely co-opts other cognitive abilities which were already present in our species. In this view, it’s possible that the Homo genus had the ability for language before it had the motivation for language and actually developed it. In this scenario, language is essentially a cultural evolution rather than a genetic adaptation. This means that it could have appeared very suddenly in the archaeological record despite there being no accompanying sudden genetic changes. Language would have swept though the existing populations in a blink of an eye, in archaeological terms, explaining how humans could have developed language after their dispersal.
As plausible as this explanation is, it’s not what the fossil record and archaeological record show. Instead we see a gradual increase in anatomical and archaeological evidence for language, spread out over several hundred thousand years (Kissel & Fuentes 2018; Johansson 2021: 387; Scerri & Will 2023). The language faculty must have emerged early in Homo’s evolutionary history, and was fully in place before humanity began to disperse across the globe.
Taking this fact as a starting point, a study published in Frontiers in Psychology last month uses genetic evidence to determine the earliest known divergence of human populations, and concluded that the first split occurred about 135,000 ya, meaning that fully modern language is at least that old. The paper and the interviews with the authors make it clear that they’re firmly in the nativist camp, but their findings are of course consistent with both nativist and functionalist perspectives.
The paper also situates the emergence of behavioral modernity at 100,000 ya rather than 50,000, which illustrates my earlier point that scholars increasingly see the Great Leap Forward as less of a leap and more of a gradual set of changes that began fairly early in our history.
That said, the authors of this study don’t seem to adhere to this gradualist perspective themselves. They characterize the 100,000 ya point as a clear inflection point:
“it is only after 100 kya that we see such behaviors become routine and normalized in H. sapiens”.
“modern human behaviors such as body decoration and the production of ochre pieces with symbolic engravings appeared as normative and persistent behaviors around 100 kya”
It’s strange that the authors pick this timeline, because it’s not the consensus among either nativists or functionalists. Scholars who see behavioral modernity as a rapid transition, a Great Leap Forward, generally choose 50,000 ya as the transition point; and scholars who see behavioral modernity as gradual generally point to evidence early in our species, even as far back as 300,000 ya (Kissel & Fuentes 2018). The authors cite work by Tatersall (2012, 2017, 2018) and Wadley (2020) in support of this timeline, but the focus of Tatersall’s papers is not the dating of those changes—he merely states that timeline in passing—and Wadley explicitly states (emphasis added), “Such reciprocal interactions between technology, cognition and society may have motivated the accumulation of innovations that are particularly visible in the archaeological record after 100,000 years ago (not as a revolution, but incrementally).” These sources aren’t really an appropriate basis for the claim that behavioral modernity occurred suddenly at 100,000 ya.
But this 100,000 ya timeline comports nicely with the authors’ nativist perspective that language was the key to modern human behavior. They state:
As the most complex communication tool yet devised in nature, it had a direct and enormous impact on all facets of human life. Language, with its complex system of mental representations and rules for combining them, is able to create new ways to connect existing symbols and predict new ways of behavior. This is, perhaps, what we see in the time gap between the lower boundary of 135kya for language, and the beginnings of the emergence of rich and normative symbolic behavior starting around 100kya. A way to interpret this gap is that language was central in organizing and systematizing modern human behavior.
In this view, humans evolved language, and soon after this led to the Great Leap Forward. But this is a more difficult claim to motivate if one assumes 50,000 ya as the tipping point.
Nonetheless, that doesn’t invalidate the authors’ findings, just the conclusion they draw from them. This study is still fascinating because it gives us an upper limit on the latest point that humanity could have developed the capacity for language—about 135,000 ya.
Press Coverage
When did humans first develop language? Scientists think they know (Earth.com)
Crucial feature of human language emerged more than 135,000 years ago (Science Alert)
Unraveling the origins: When did human language first emerge? (Science Magazine)
Original Research Article
Miyagawa et al. 2025. Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago. Frontiers in Psychology 16. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1503900
Other Research This Week
Here’s an interesting study that shows that we tend to interpret people more literally when they speak with a foreign accent, making it harder to realize they’re engaging in sarcasm or irony—and thus causing a lot more miscommunication!
How foreign accents subconsciously shape the way we interact (The Conversation)
Another study shows that birds use their songs not just to signal to members of their own species, but to coordinate with individuals from other species during migrations as well.
Migrating birds sing to team up with other species (Scientific American)
📃 This Week’s Reads
Interesting articles I've come across this week.
Jessica Kruk (@TalkingInTongues on TikTok) and Lauren Gawne (of the Lingthusiasm podcast) have an article in The Conversation explaining why older adults sometimes find use of emoji by adolescents iniquitous or as having hidden meanings, and how these fears are unfounded.
Adolescence has sparked fears over teen slang – but emoji don’t cause radicalisation (The Conversation)
Lauren also has an older article for The Conversation explaining how emoji are best thought of as digital gestures:
Emoji aren’t ruining language: They’re a natural substitute for gesture (The Conversation)
The Babbel blog discusses how multilingualism “may be the best route to a stronger, nimbler brain”:
Is the name for the letter ⟨z⟩ “zee” or “zed”? Traditionally the U.S. has called it “zee” while the U.K. calls it “zed”, but it seems that English-speaking countries are gradually shifting to “zee”, presumably due to American influence.
How you pronounce this letter may reveal your age, linguist says (Huffington Post)
There’s been a uptick in research (or perhaps, scientifically-informed thought experiments) lately about xenolinguistics, the study of alien languages, which I actually find to be a useful exercise in understanding the fundamental nature of symbolic systems of communication. There’s both a monograph and an edited volume about the topic:
And Southern Illinois University recently organized a small workshop about it:
I myself even hopped on the trend, exploring what fictional languages like that of the Three-Body Problem books can tell us about human language:
What alien languages can teach us about human language: The linguistics of The Three-Body Problem
Imagine if every word you thought could be heard by everyone around you. In this world, thinking would be the same as communicating. What would language—and society—be like?
Now this month’s issue of Scientific American takes a look at some of this recent research, and how it’s both preparing humanity for first contact and helping explain language itself:
How might aliens communicate? The answer could reveal the point of language. (Scientific American)
A few weeks back I made some fun videos stitching (replying to) videos of people struggling with tip of the tongue incidents (also called lethologica):
Tip of the tongue phenomena (Linguistic Discovery)
Last month The Conversation also published an article about the neuroscience behind tip of the tongue phenomena:
What happens in the brain when there’s a word ‘on the tip of the tongue’? (The Conversation)
And if you’d like to dive deeper into these kinds of speech errors, here’s a great book about the topic:
Babbel has a neat post on all the words English borrowed from Old Norse, the language of the Vikings. The most surprising of these, from a linguistic perspective, is they, the third person plural pronoun, simply because it’s rare for languages to borrow grammatical/function words from other languages in this way.
📚 Books & Media
New (and old) books and media touching on language and linguistics.
New Scientist has a cool review of a new book, The Mesopotamian Riddle: An archaeologist, a soldier, a clergyman, and the race to decipher the world’s oldest writing. Like it sounds, the book tells the story of how cuneiform was deciphered. I’m pretty excited to read it!
And if you’d like to learn more about how cuneiform evolved, be sure to check out this issue of the Linguistic Discovery newsletter:
Babel: The Language Magazine recently published its 50th issue! This one has a big list of 50 recommended books on language and linguistics, plus a neat article about Nüshu, a women’s script used in a region of Hunan Province, China, as well as the cool article about whistle languages I discussed above.
Get your own subscription here.
(Full Disclosure: I volunteer on Babel’s Advisory Panel, but it’s an unpaid position which I took on as part of my service work to the field.)
I hope you enjoyed this week’s issue! If you’ve been finding these digests fun or informative, click the like button below and let me know!
Have a great week!
~ Danny
📑 References
Johansson. 2021. The dawn of language: How we came to talk. Maclehose Press.
Kissel & Fuentes. 2018. ‘Behavioral modernity’ as a process, not an event, in the human niche. Time & Mind 11(2): 163–183. DOI: 10.1080/1751696X.2018.1469230
Scerri & Will. 2023. The revolution that still isn’t: The origins of behavioral complexity in Homo sapiens. Journal of Human Evolution 179. DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2023.103358
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