I Can’t Sleep - Language | Can't Sleep? Learn How Humans Learned to Talk

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

Human language may have started with gestures, sounds, and early attempts to cooperate long before written history existed. This episode explores theories about how humans learned to communicate, how spoken language evolved alongside civilization, and why every culture developed its own unique way of speaking. Benjamin talks about the long history of humans trying to organize thoughts into something another person could actually understand. It turns out language is one of humanity’s greatest achievements, built mostly by people trying to explain where the food was or whose goat escaped again. It’s steady and consistent, with no whispering and no sudden changes, just enough to give your mind something to follow as you wind down. Happy sleeping! Ad-free episodes: https://icantsleep.supportingcast.fm/Have a topic in mind? https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/request-a-topic Read with permission from Language, Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. — Ad-free episodes: icantsleep.supportingcast.fmHave a topic in mind? Request a topic Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and sign forms. It may also be conveyed through writing. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time. Human languages possess the properties of productivity and displacement, which enable the creation of an infinite number of sentences,

and the ability to refer to objects, events, and ideas that are not immediately present in the discourse. The use of human language relies on social convention and is acquired through learning. Estimates of the number of human languages in the world vary between 5,000 and 7,000. Precise estimates depend on an arbitrary distinction dichotomy established between languages and dialects. Natural languages are spoken, signed, or both. However, any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli. For example, writing, whistling, signing, or Braille. In other words, human language is modality independent, but written or signed language is the way to inscribe or encode the natural human speech or gestures.

Depending on philosophical perspectives regarding the definition of language and meaning, when used as a general concept, language may refer to the cognitive ability to learn and use systems of complex communication, or to describe the set of rules that makes up these systems, or the set of utterances that can be produced from those rules. All languages rely on the process of semiosis to relate signs to particular meanings. Oral, manual, and tactile languages contain a phonological system that governs how symbols are used to form sequences known as words or morphemes, and a syntactic system that governs how words and morphemes are combined to form phrases and utterances.

The scientific study of language is called linguistics, critical examinations of languages, such as philosophy of language, the relationship between language and thought, how words represent experience, etc., have been debated at least since Gorgios and Plato in ancient Greek civilization. Thinkers, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712 to 1778, have argued that language originated from emotions, while others like Emmanuel Kant, 1724 to 1878, have argued that languages originated from rational and logical thought. 20th century philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1889 to 1951, argued that philosophy is really the study of language itself.

Major figures in contemporary linguistics include Ferdinand de Sessier and Nomschamsky. Language is thought to have gradually diverged from earlier primate communication systems. When early hominins acquired the ability to form a theory of mind and share intentionality, this development is sometimes thought to have coincided with an increase in brain volume. And many linguists see the structure of language as having evolved to serve specific communicative and social functions. Language is processed in many different locations in the human brain, but especially in Broca's and Vernica's areas.

Humans acquire language through social interaction in early childhood, and children generally speak fluently by approximately three years old. Language and culture are codependent. Therefore, in addition to its strictly communicative uses, language has social uses such as signifying group identity, social stratification, as well as use for social grooming and entertainment. Languages evolve and diversify over time, and the history of their evolution can be reconstructed by comparing modern languages, to determine which traits their ancestral languages must have had, in order for the later developmental stages to occur. A group of languages that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family.

In contrast, a language that has been demonstrated not to have any living or non-living relationship with another language, is called a language isolate. There are also many unclassified languages whose relationships have not been established, and spurious languages may have not existed at all. Academic consensus holds that between 50% and 90% of languages spoken at the beginning of the 21st century will probably have become extinct by the year 2100. The English word language derives ultimately from proto-Indo-European, Dengues, tongue, speech, language. Through Latin, lingua, language, tongue, and old French, langage.

The word is sometimes used to refer to codes, ciphers, and other kinds of artificially constructed communication. systems, such as formally defined computer languages, used for computer programming. Unlike conventional human languages, a formal language in this sense is a system of signs for encoding and decoding information. As an object of linguistic study, language has two primary meanings, an abstract concept and a specific linguistic system, e.g. French. The Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Sessier, who defined the modern discipline of linguistics, first explicitly formulated the distinction using the French word langrage for language as a concept. Long as a specific instance of a language system

and parole for the concrete use of speech in a particular language. When speaking of language as a general concept, definitions can be used which stress different aspects of the phenomenon. These definitions also entail different approaches and understandings of language, and they also inform different and often incompatible schools of linguistic theory. theory. Debates about the nature and origin of language go back to the ancient world. Greek philosophers such as Gorgios and Plato debated the relation between words, concepts, and reality. Gorgias argued that language could represent neither of the objective experience nor human experience

and that communication and truth were therefore impossible. Plato maintained that communication is possible because language represents ideas and concepts that exist independently of and prior to language. During the Enlightenment and its debates about human origins, it became fashionable to speculate about the origin of language. Thinkers, such as Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder, argued that language had originated in the instinctive expression of emotions, and that it was originally closer to music and poetry than to the logical expression of rational thought.

Rationalist philosophers, such as Kant and René Descartes, held the opposite view. Around the turn of the 20th century, thinkers began to wonder about the role of language and shaping our experiences of the world, asking whether language simply reflects the objective structure of the world, or whether it creates concepts that in turn impose structure on our experience of the objective world. This led to the question of whether philosophical problems are really firstly linguistic problems. The resurgence of the view that language plays a significant role in the creation and circulation of concepts, and that the study of philosophy is essentially the study of language,

is associated with what has been called the linguistic turn and philosophers such as Wittgenstein in 20th century philosophy. These debates about language in relation to meaning and reference, confidence, cognition, and consciousness, remain active today. One definition sees language primarily as the mental faculty that allows humans to undertake linguistic behavior, to learn languages, and to produce and understand utterances. This definition stresses the universality of language to all humans, and it emphasizes the biological basis for the human capacity for language as a unique development of the human brain. Proponents of the view that the drive to language acquisition is innate in humans

argue that this is supported by the fact that all cognitively normal children raised in an environment where language is accessible will acquire language without formal instruction. Languages may even develop spontaneously in environments where people live or grow up together without a common language. For example, Creole languages and spontaneously developed sign languages, such as Nicaraguan Sign Language. This view, which can be traced back to the philosophers Kant and Descartes, understands language to be largely innate. For example, in Chomsky's theory of universal grammar, or American philosopher

Jerry Fodor's extreme innatist theory. These kinds of definitions are often applied in studies of language within a cognitive science framework and in neurolinguistics. Another definition sees language as a formal system of signs governed by grammatical rules of combination to communicate meaning. This definition stresses that human languages can be described as closed structural systems, consisting of rules that relate particular signs to particular meanings. This structuralist view of language was first introduced by Ferdinandesasieu, and his structuralism remains foundational for many approaches to language. Some proponents of Socier's view of language have advocated a formal approach that studies

language structure by identifying its basic elements, and then by presenting a formal account of the rules according to which the elements combine in order to form words and sentences. The main proponent of such a theory is Noam Chomsky, the originator of the generative theory of grammar, who is defined language as the construction of sentences that can be generated using transformational grammars. Chomsky considers these rules to be an innate feature of the human mind, and to constitute the rudiments of what language is. By way of contrast, such transformational grammars are also commonly used in formal logic,

in formal linguistics, and in applied computational linguistics. In the philosophy of language, the view of linguistic meaning as residing in the logical relations between propositions and reality was developed by philosophers such as Alfred Tarski Bertrand Russell, and other formal logicians. Yet another definition sees language as a system of communications that enables humans to exchange verbal or symbolic utterances. This definition stresses the social functions of language and the fact that humans use it to express themselves

and to manipulate objects in their environment. Functional theories of grammar explain grammatical structures by their communicative functions and understand the grammatical structures of language to be the result of an adaptive process by which grammar was tailored to serve the communicative needs of its users. The view of language is associated with the study of language in pragmatic, cognitive, and interactive framework. as well as in social linguistics and linguistic anthropology. Functionalist theories tend to study grammar as dynamic phenomena, as structures that are always in the process of changing

as they are employed by their speakers. This view places importance on the study of linguistic typology, or the classification of languages according to structural, features, as processes of grammaticalization tend to follow trajectories that are partly dependent on typology. In the philosophy of language, the view of pragmatics as being central to language and meaning is often associated with Wittgenstein's later works, and with ordinary language philosophers such as J. L. Austin, Paul Greis, John Searle, and W. O. Quine. A number of features, many of which were described by Charles Hockett and called design features, set human language

apart from communication used by non-human animals. Communication systems used by other animals, such as bees or apes, are closed systems that consist of a finite, usually very limited number of possible ideas that can be expressed. In contrast, human language is open-ended and productive, meaning that it allows humans to produce a vast range of utterances from a finite set of elements, and to create new words and sentences. This is possible because human language is based on a dual code, in which a finite number of elements, which are meaningless in themselves,

e.g., sounds, letters, or gestures, can be combined to form an infinite number of larger units of meaning, words and sentences. However, one study has demonstrated that an Australian bird, the chestnut-crowned babbler, is capable of using the same acoustic elements in different arrangements to create two functionally distinct vocalizations.

Additionally, pied babblers have demonstrated the ability to generate two functionally distinct vocalizations composed of the same sound type, which can only be distinguished by the number of the number of the number of the number of the by the number of repeated elements. Several species of animals have proved to be able to acquire forms of communication through social learning. For instance, a bonobo named Kanzi learned to express itself using a set of symbolic lexagrams.

Similarly, many species of birds and whales learn their songs by imitating other members of their species. However, while some animals may acquire large numbers of words and symbols, none have been able to learn as many different signs as are generally known by an average four-year-old human, nor have any acquired anything resembling the complex grammar of human language. Human languages differ from animal communication systems and that they employ grammatical and semantic categories, such as noun and verb, present and past, which may be used to express exceedingly complex meanings. It is distinguished by the property of recursivity.

For example, a noun phrase can contain another noun phrase, as in the chimpanzee's lips, or a clause contain another clause, as in, I see the dog is running. Human language is the only known natural communication system, whose adaptability may be referred to as modality independent. This means that it can be used not only for communication through one channel or medium, but through several. For example, spoken language uses the auditive modality, whereas sign languages and writing use the visual modality, and Braille writing uses the tactile modality. Human language is unusual in being able to refer to abstract concepts, and to imagined or hypothetical events, as well as events that took place in the past or may happen in the future.

This ability to refer to events that are not at the same time or place as the speech event is called displacement. And while some animal communication systems can use displacement, such as the communication of bees that can communicate the location of sources of nectar that are out of sight, the degree to which it is used in human language, is also considered unique. Theories about the origin of language differ in regard to their basic assumptions about what language is.

Some theories are based on the idea that language is so complex that one cannot imagine it simply appearing from nothing in its final form, but that it must have evolved from earlier pre-linguistic systems among our pre-linguistic systems among our pre-human ancestors. These theories can be called continuity-based theories. The opposite viewpoint is that language is such a unique human trait, that it cannot be compared to anything found among non-humans, and that it must therefore have appeared suddenly

in the transition from pre-homelids to early man. These theories can be defined as discontinuity-based. Similarly, theories based on the generative view of language, pioneered by Nomschamski, see language mostly as an innate faculty that is largely genetically encoded, whereas functionalist theories see it as a system that is largely cultural, learn through social interaction. Continuity-based theories are held by a majority of scholars. but they vary in how they envision this development. Those who see language as being mostly in aid, such as psychologist Stephen Pinker, hold the precedence to be animal cognition.

Whereas those who see language as a socially learned tool of communication, such as psychologist Michael Tomaselo, see it as having developed from animal communication in primation. either gestural or vocal communication to assist in cooperation. Other continuity-based models see language as having developed from music. A view already espoused by Rousseau, Herder, Humboldt, and Charles Darwin. A prominent proponent of this view is archaeologist Stephen Mithin. Stephen Anderson states that the age of spoken languages is estimated

at 60,000 to 100,000 years, and that researchers on the evolutionary origin of language generally find it plausible to suggest that language is invented only ones, and that all modern spoken languages are thus in some way related, even if that relation can no longer be recovered, because of limitations on the methods available for reconstruction. Because language emerged in the early prehistory of man, before the existence of any written records, its early development has left no historical traces, and it is believed that no comparable processes can be observed today.

Theories that stress continuity often look at animals to see if, for example, primates display any traits that can be seen. seen as analogous to what pre-human language must have been like. Early human fossils can be inspected for traces of physical adaptation to language use or pre-linguistic forms of symbolic behavior. Among the signs in human fossils that may suggest linguistic abilities are the size of the brain relative to body mass. The presence of a larynx capable of advanced sound production, and the nature of tools and other manufactured artifacts. The study of language, linguistics, has been developing into a science since the first grammatical

descriptions of particular languages in India, more than 2000 years ago, after the development of Brahmi's script. Modern linguistics is a science that concerns itself with all aspects of language. examining it from all of the theoretical viewpoints described above. The academic study of language is conducted within many different disciplinary areas and from different theoretical angles, all of which inform modern approaches to linguistics. For example, descriptive linguistics examines the grammar of single languages.

Theoretical linguistics develops developed, It develops theories on how best to conceptualize and define the nature of language, based on data from the various extant human languages. Sociolinguistics studies how languages are used for social purposes, informing in turn the study of the social functions of language in grammatical description. Neurolinguistics studies how language is processed in the human brain, and allows the experimental testing of theories. Computational linguistics builds on theoretical and descriptive linguistics

to construct computational models of language, often aimed at processing natural language or at testing linguistic hypotheses. And historical linguistics relies on grammatical and lexical descriptions of languages to trace their individual histories and reconstruct trees of language families by using the comparative method. The formal study of language is often considered to have started in India with Ponani, the 5th century BC Grammarian, who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology. However, Sumerian scribes already studied the differences,

between Sumerian and Acadian grammar around 1900 BC. Subsequent grammatical traditions developed in all of the ancient cultures that adopted writing. In the 17th century AD, the French Port Royal Grammarians developed the idea that the grammars of all languages were a reflection of the universal basics of thought, and therefore that grammar was universal. In the 18th century, the first use of the comparative method by British philologist and expert

on ancient India, William Jones, sparked the rise of comparative linguistics. The scientific study of language was broadened from Indo-European to language in general by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Early in the 20th century, Ferdinand de Sussure introduced the idea of language as a static system of interconnected units defined through the oppositions between them. By introducing a distinction between diachronic and synchronic analyses of language, he laid the foundation of the modern discipline of linguistics. Sousier also introduced several basic dimensions of linguistic analysis that are still fundamental

in many contemporary linguistic theories. such as the distinctions between syndicum and paradigm and the long parole distinction distinguishing language as an abstract system long from language as a concrete manifestation of this system