Have you ever wondered how language actually began?

Think about it.

A person in Japan speaks Japanese. A person in France speaks French. Someone in Ghana may speak English, Twi, Ewe or Ga. Someone in Brazil speaks Portuguese, while someone in Egypt may speak Arabic.

But humans are the same species.

So how did we end up with thousands of different languages?

And perhaps an even more interesting question:

If someone from Japan met someone from France hundreds or thousands of years ago, how would they know what the other person’s words meant?

The answer takes us back to the very beginnings of human communication.

Before There Were Languages, There Was Communication

Humans did not suddenly wake up one morning and decide to create languages.

Long before writing—and probably long before fully developed languages—humans communicated through sounds, gestures, facial expressions, pointing, body movements and other forms of social interaction.

Imagine two people who don’t share a language.

One person points at water and makes a particular sound.

The other person hears the sound, sees what is being pointed at and eventually begins to associate the sound with the water.

Do this repeatedly, across hundreds or thousands of interactions, and that sound can eventually become a recognised word.

The exact process by which the first human language emerged remains one of the great unanswered questions in science. We have no recording of the first conversation and no written evidence from the beginning of spoken language.

But we know something important:

Language is constantly changing.

And that helps explain how today’s enormous variety of languages developed.

How One Language Can Become Many

Imagine that a community of people speaks the same language.

Now imagine that part of the community moves hundreds of kilometres away.

At first, the two groups continue speaking almost the same language.

But they are no longer living together.

Over generations, their languages begin to change.

People develop different pronunciations.

New words appear.

Some old words disappear.

Grammar changes.

Other languages influence them.

Eventually, the two groups may speak languages that are no longer mutually understandable.

This process is called language divergence.

It is similar to the branches of a tree.

One original branch splits into two.

Those branches split again.

And eventually you have hundreds of branches.

Geography Played a Huge Role

Human migration helped accelerate this process.

As humans moved across continents and settled in different regions, communities became separated by mountains, deserts, oceans, forests and enormous distances.

When communities have little contact with one another, their languages can develop independently.

This helps explain why languages spoken thousands of kilometres apart can sound completely unrelated.

But isolation wasn’t the whole story.

Humans also travelled.

They traded.

They migrated.

They fought wars.

They formed kingdoms and empires.

They married people from other communities.

And every time different groups interacted, their languages influenced one another.

So How Would a Japanese Person Communicate With a French Person?

This is where your original question becomes particularly interesting.

Imagine two people meeting who have absolutely no common language.

The Japanese speaker says something.

The French speaker has no idea what it means.

So they begin with what humans have always had:

gestures.

One person points.

The other watches.

Someone picks up an object.

They make a sound.

The other person repeats it.

They laugh.

They point again.

Slowly, they begin establishing associations.

“This sound means this object.”

“That gesture means go.”

“That sound means food.”

“This movement means come.”

Communication doesn’t have to begin with a dictionary.

The dictionary comes later.

Shared experience allows people to create meaning.

Trade Probably Helped Connect Languages

Imagine two communities living in different regions.

One has salt.

The other has animal skins.

They want to trade.

Neither speaks the other’s language.

But they have a common interest:

They want the exchange to happen.

So they point.

They demonstrate.

They repeat sounds.

They develop simple ways of communicating.

When this interaction happens repeatedly, more words and expressions can be learned.

Over time, communities that trade regularly can borrow words from each other.

This is one reason languages around the world contain words that originated elsewhere.

Languages Borrow From One Another

Languages are not sealed boxes.

They constantly interact.

English, for example, has borrowed words from many languages throughout its history.

French, Latin, Greek, Norse and many other languages have influenced English.

And English has influenced countless other languages in return.

Sometimes a community adopts a foreign word because there is no existing word for the thing being described.

Sometimes the foreign word simply becomes popular.

Sometimes political power, trade or cultural influence causes one language to spread.

Language is therefore not only a system of communication.

It is also a record of human contact.

New Languages Can Even Develop From Contact

Something even more fascinating can happen when people who speak different languages need to communicate regularly.

They may begin developing a simplified communication system using elements of their different languages.

These systems are known as pidgins.

If children grow up using such a system as their main language, it can develop into a fully developed language known as a creole, with its own grammar and vocabulary.

This shows us something remarkable:

Humans don’t simply use language. Humans are capable of creating language.

Why Didn’t Everyone Just Keep One Original Language?

We don’t know whether humanity ever had one single original language.

There are theories about how early language may have developed, but because spoken language existed long before writing, we cannot directly observe its earliest stages.

What we do know is that human populations repeatedly separated, migrated, mixed and changed.

Languages changed with them.

Some disappeared.

Some merged.

Some split into new languages.

Others survived for thousands of years.

Today, thousands of languages exist around the world.

Language Is Still Evolving

The process hasn’t stopped.

You can see it happening today.

New slang appears.

Old expressions disappear.

New technologies create new vocabulary.

People shorten words.

Different generations develop different ways of speaking.

Social media spreads expressions across countries in days.

A word that is unfamiliar today may become completely normal tomorrow.

In other words, language is alive.

It changes because humans change.

Perhaps the Most Amazing Part Is That We Can Understand Each Other at All

Think about how extraordinary human communication really is.

Someone makes a sound with their mouth.

Another person hears that sound.

Their brain converts it into meaning.

And suddenly, an invisible idea has moved from one human mind into another.

We can talk about food that isn’t in the room.

We can describe places we’ve never visited.

We can discuss things that happened thousands of years ago.

We can imagine the future.

We can express love, anger, fear, humour and complex philosophical ideas.

All through sounds, symbols and shared meanings.

And somehow, despite humanity being divided into thousands of linguistic communities, we have repeatedly found ways to communicate across those boundaries.

Perhaps that is the real story of language.

Human beings may speak different languages, but our desire to communicate is universal.

We point.

We gesture.

We make sounds.

We teach.

We learn.

We borrow.

We adapt.

And over thousands of years, those simple acts have produced one of the most extraordinary things humanity has ever created:

language.