The mother of all languages - fact or fiction?
February 07, 2018

An almost unfathomable inventory of different words for one and the same thing. Some languages are closely related, others just have common roots, and yet more seemingly have nothing in common at all.

This variety of languages has fascinated mankind for millennia. But is there a common proto-language from which all of mankind’s different languages are descended - in other words, ‘a mother of all languages’? There are a number of theories based on the idea of a so-called ‘Proto-Human language’. The endeavour to get to the bottom of the connections between languages and to identify a possible proto-language is not limited to the modern field of linguistics: people were trying to find the answer using what they considered to be scientific methods as far back as 2,000 years ago.

The search for a proto-language

One of the stories passed on by the Greek historian Herodotus relates how Pharaoh Wahibre Psamtik I attempted to identify the mother of all languages as far back as Ancient Egyptian times. He instructed a shepherd to bring up two newly-born children in such a way that they would not come into contact with any spoken words. Two years later, both of the children are reputed to have asked for bread in Phrygian. The Egyptian sovereign deduced that the Phrygians were an even older people than the Egyptians, and that mankind must have somehow internalised their language.

Monoglottogenese: the belief in a ‘mother of all languages’

The theory that all human languages share a common route is called monoglottogenese (or linguistic monogenesis). It supposes a hypothetical linguistic form from which the individual language families developed. There is one language family in particular that gave rise to the most commonly spoken languages to date: the Indo-European languages. Members of this family include the Germanic languages, such as English, German, Dutch and Afrikaans. Both English and Dutch can be traced back to the West Germanic language group and are closely related. Baltic languages such as Lithuanian and Latvian, Romance languages such as French and Spanish, Slavic languages and many others all stem from the same Indo-European language family.

From Indo-European to Proto-Afroasiatic: an abundance of language families

There are similarities in the vocabulary, grammatical categories (number, gender) and the ablaut (vowel change within a word) between all of the Indo-European languages. In all, around three billion people worldwide speak a language that is part of this language family. Working on the basis of the modern Indo-European languages, it has been possible to reconstruct the so-called Proto-Indo-European language, from which all of these languages are thought to have evolved. There are in fact several language families for which a proto-language has been reconstructed, including Proto-Uralic, Proto-Turkish, Proto-Mongolian and Proto Afroasiatic. To this day, however, nobody has yet managed to reconstruct the true ‘mother of all languages’ - in other words the origin of all human language.