609▶ language
introduction
Most paleontologists believe that modern humans, called
Homo sapiens, as well as their language originated in Africa.
Th e language spoken by the San (commonly called Bushmen)
is believed to be related to the fi rst languages spoken in Africa.
In ancient times the San populated most of sub-Saharan Af-
rica, only to be pushed aside by the Bantu-speaking peoples
who now populate most of Africa. Th eir language includes
clicking sounds that are unique, and these clicks are thought
to have been par t of Af rica’s fi rst languages. Over thousands of
years some Africans lost the clicking sound from their speech;
these people were the ancestors of the people who spread out
from Africa to populate the rest of the world. Th is is why the
clicks of the San are not found elsewhere in the world.
Linguists have struggled hard to trace the development of
languages aft er people migrated out of Africa, but developments
during and before the last great ice age, which ended about
9000 b.c.e., may be impossible to fully trace. Complicating the
history of language is a side branch of human development, the
Neanderthals, who may have been a subgroup of Homo sapi-
ens or a diff erent human species that evolved in Europe or the
Near East rather than in Africa. Some paleontologists believe
the Neanderthals could speak languages, but others think that
the shape of the palate and throat of Neanderthals would have
limited them to a small number of grunts.
Perhaps the earliest of ancient languages outside Africa
were those of the Elamo-Dravidian group. Elamo refers to the
Elamites who lived in the Near East and Dravidian refers to
the peoples who migrated along the southern coast of Asia
and across islands to Australia. In ancient times their descen-
dants populated such places as the Indus River valley, most of
India, and almost all of Southeast Asia, including South Viet-
nam and Indonesia. Other early language groups are harder to
trace. According to technology that traces changes in human
genes that have been passed on over time, the descendants of
a group of people who settled in central Asia populated all
the rest of the world, including the Americas. Th is could have
happened more than 100,000 years ago, though paleontolo-
gists disagree vigorously with each other about the date.
Linguists can begin tracing most of the world’s languages
in about 9000 b.c.e. By then Indo-European had developed
somewhere in eastern Europe or central Asia and was spread-
ing west, east, and south. Th e languages of the ancestors
of the Chinese and other east Asians were developing. Th e
peoples who migrated to the Americas brought a root lan-
guage from central Asia, a language that may have remained
among the Ainu ethnic group of Japan, who during the last
great ice age probably populated all of eastern Asia north of
the Dravidians. Research into Native American languages is
complicated by the problem of repeated migrations from the
Old World into the Americas, perhaps as many as seven ma-
jor migrations over thousands of years. Whether the Native
American languages have only one root language or more is
not yet known.AFRICA
BY HAIG DER-HOUSSIKIAN
Languages on the African continent are divided into four dis-
tinct groupings: Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan,