According to biblical traditions, in ancient times people were so proud that they planned to build a city and a tower as high as heaven. The Lord God decided to interfere with the builders by mixing their languages.

The result of God's wrath was not long in coming. The builders could not understand each other, thus the construction of the skyscraper was stopped, and people dispersed all over the globe.

There is an explanation in the difference in the language of people and from a scientific point of view. Linguists say that language, as a means of communication between people, is constantly changing. It is argued that there is no barrier that would protect him from change.

There are about 5,000 living languages ​​and dialects worldwide. The multilingualism of the Earth's population developed due to many reasons, for example, the disunity of the life of the ancient tribes, who lived in groups, and did not even suspect the existence of other people.

Each tribe created its own so-called proto-language, which subsequently developed and branched out. All languages ​​that have evolved from the same proto-language can be attributed to one "family" of languages. Around the world, there are about 13 families of languages, from which many of the existing languages ​​​​have arisen.

According to biblical traditions, in ancient times people were so proud that they planned to build a city and a tower as high as heaven. But God decided to thwart their plan by mixing the languages ​​of the ancient builders so that they no longer understood each other...

Before the start of the great migration from Africa, something happened to humanity, and there appeared new form communications. Most modern languages ​​were born during the Ice Age. Having made this conclusion, linguists are getting closer and closer to the origins of speech, comparing their hypotheses with the biblical legend.

According to biblical traditions, in ancient times people were so proud that they planned to build a city and a tower as high as heaven. But God decided to interfere with their plan, mixing the languages ​​​​of the ancient builders so that they no longer understand each other. The grandiose construction stopped, and multilingual builders dispersed throughout the earth.

Linguists have their own view of the problem - the language is constantly changing, and there is no barrier that could protect it from these transformations. Words invented and borrowed from other languages ​​are constantly wedged into our communication.

At the same time, for reasons that are not entirely clear, some languages ​​evolve much faster than others. Italian, for example, has remained much closer to Classical Latin than French. Lithuanian has many words that exactly match Sanskrit, which was spoken 3,500 years ago.

American linguists conducted a study in an attempt to reduce all the world's languages ​​to a single root. About 50,000 years ago something unusual happened to our ancestors in Africa. Moreover, the ancient people, who had already existed for at least 150 thousand years, suddenly began to behave differently.

Until then, their behavior was hardly different from the mores of the Neanderthals. They used stone tools and had some form of communication that scientists suggest was based on gestures, facial expressions and sounds.

The advent of speech accelerated progress. Scientists believe that a new means of communication has allowed humanity to make a huge leap forward. This event was more important than the computer or biotech revolutions combined, experts say.

It is assumed that ancient people developed speech before the great migration from Africa. “Perhaps they were trying to discuss the paths of the upcoming migration to Europe and Asia, and it was not so easy to manage only with gestures in this regard,” the scientists joke.

A team of researchers from the Santa Fe Institute is working to find the "mother of all languages". The Evolution of Human Languages ​​(EHL) Project, led by Nobel laureate, physicist Murray Gell-Mann creates a unique etymological base about all the languages ​​of the world. EHL linguists are trying to restore and then compare ancestral languages, moving closer to the origins human speech. The project has already caused a mixed reaction from the scientific community. Many linguists are convinced that beyond the threshold of eight thousand years, all attempts to find the language root are unreasonable.

EHL linguists were only angered by the criticism. They grouped all the world's languages ​​into 12 linguistic superfamilies, four of which (including the languages ​​of Eurasia, North Africa, Oceania, and possibly the Americas) were experimentally combined into one company, calling it Borean (which means "northern"). The ancestor of most modern languages, according to researchers, appeared 16 thousand years ago, when glaciers covered most of North America and Europe.

Linguists continue to develop their hypothesis. They seem to have proved how, from one language group the lion's share of the Eurasian, American and North African languages ​​​​were able to form.

In their opinion, the Ice Age is to blame for everything. 20 thousand years ago, at its peak, humanity lost most of its linguistic diversity. As the glacier moved south, people migrated with it and mixed with each other both genetically and linguistically. As a result, a complex “linguistic puree” was formed, which scientists tried to disassemble.

Perhaps you once wondered why we speak different languages? Agree, it makes our life very difficult. Here, for example, you want to go on a trip somewhere abroad. Starting from the airport and ending with the search for accommodation on the spot, all these steps are impossible without knowledge foreign language. Thankfully there is one international language- English. In principle, knowledge of this language is quite enough if you are going to . But, unfortunately, the inhabitants of far from every country are fluent in English. Where did this difference in languages ​​come from? There are two answers to this question: scientific and biblical.

Scientists version

Historians put forward the idea of ​​the emergence of linguistic differences in prehistoric times. The reason for this sudden change in speech lay in their misunderstanding due to the mountains, deserts, and oceans separating the human tribes. Thus, in each tribal group appeared its own dialect of the language available at that time. How more people became, the more the difference in languages ​​increased. After a certain period of time, separate groups of words appeared. Scholars are of the opinion that All the languages ​​of the world have a common language base.

In addition to human languages, there are also artificial languages. This is a language system that was created by people for the purpose of communication between representatives of both nationalities and fantastic works.

Why People Speak Different Tongues - The Bible

We all know the biblical story of Adam and Eve. Initially, according to God's plan, they were supposed to live forever on earth. Children were to be born to them, who would later fill the earth. Initially, there was no talk of different languages ​​and misunderstanding of each other. But what happened? The fact is that the first people did not want to live according to God's standards and sinned by eating the forbidden fruit. What followed? Their descendants began to be born sinful and imperfect.

Centuries after the death of Adam and Eve people began to build the Tower of Babel. For what purpose? They were going to get to God himself. The instigator of this idea was Nimrod. He formed the first city on Earth - Babylon. God did not like the idea of ​​Nimrod and he confused the languages ​​of the builders. As a result, people could not continue this ill-fated construction, because they no longer understood each other. Nothing has changed since that time. But it is quite possible that one day God will decide to unite people again, giving them a single language that will become native to every person on earth.

Why do people speak different languages? There is no definite answer to this question. Scholars and the Bible interpret it differently. The first argue that initially all people spoke the same language, and understood each other perfectly. They solved all emerging issues peacefully, without resorting to violence. To some extent, this was due to their compact living. Simply put, all the tribes lived in the neighborhood, could easily communicate with each other, in the same language, understandable to everyone.

The Bible has a different point of view. In order to have access to heaven, people decided to build a tower, which was called the Babylonian. At the same time, they did not ask permission from God, which made him angry. As punishment, he settled people all over the planet, and forced them to speak different languages, which led to serious difficulties in their communication.

This is how the Bible interprets multilingualism. Scientists agree that the process of the emergence of different languages ​​was quite long. At first, people lived on earth in small groups and communicated with each other with gestures. Their main occupation was hunting. But in the process of evolution, a person had additional needs that led to the unification of various tribes. Now a person needed not only to hunt, but also to build housing, farm, make tools, sew clothes, etc. This could only be done together. It was in this way that peoples arose, with their own language of communication.

Initially, it differed little from its primitive counterpart, and only over time began to acquire its own dialect. At the same time, different peoples this process took place individually. Final result we are well known. Today, each nation has its own language, and in order to understand each other, we are forced to resort to the help of an interpreter. At the same time, language transformation continues. To some extent, this is facilitated by wars leading to the seizure of foreign territories. As a result, languages ​​merge, leading to the appearance of certain linguistic symbioses, and completely unique dialects. Such, for example, is the dialect of the Transcarpathians. Their language contains many Slovak, Magyar, Ruthenian and Ukrainian words.

This is how new languages ​​are born. They may retain their grammar but include entirely new expressions. In this case, the language of the people of the conqueror always wins. So, for example, it happened with the tribes of the Franks, who lost their language and fell under the influence of Gaul. All that remains of him is the name of the country, which we all know well. In this case, we are talking about France.

There are about 5,000 living languages ​​and dialects worldwide. The multilingualism of the Earth's population developed due to many reasons, for example, the disunity of the life of the ancient tribes, who lived in groups, and did not even suspect the existence of other people. Each tribe created its own so-called proto-language, which subsequently developed and branched out. There are about 13 such proto-languages ​​in total.

Inhabitants different countries around the world speak different languages. Sometimes in one state there are several dozen languages ​​and dialects, for example, in the USA in New York alone people speak 129 languages ​​and dialects. There are living (spoken), dead (for example, Latin) languages, the language of the deaf and dumb, artificial languages, and even fictional ones, for example, Elvish from J. Tolkien's trilogy "The Lord of the Rings".
The common function of all varieties of languages ​​is communicative. This is a means of sound, sign (written) and gesture communication, information transfer.

Until now, there are two scientific hypotheses of the origin of languages, as well as many myths and legends. Some scholars assume that all modern languages originate from one language, the so-called pra-world. However, it is not necessarily the primary language. There may have been other languages ​​in the past that have become extinct. This linguistic hypothesis is called the theory of monogenesis.

The second hypothesis, the polygenesis theory, is that existing languages descended from several proto-languages ​​that were created and developed independently of each other. In any case, none of the concepts can be historically confirmed due to the age and lack of evidence.

One way or another, the tribes that inhabited the Earth several millennia ago already spoke different languages. The population of the planet grew, states were created, mass migrations and mixing of peoples took place, lands were seized, the social structure changed. All these changes could not but affect the development of languages.

Tribes grew, branched out, mastered new territories, the same languages ​​developed differently in different places, dialects appeared. Thus, nowadays it is already difficult to imagine that, for example, English and Russian languages ​​belong to different branches (Germanic and Balto-Slavic) of one language family- Indo-European. Its proto-language, Proto-Indo-European, arose about 5-6 thousand years ago.

There are 5,000, and according to some sources, about 7,000 languages ​​in the world. They are studied by an extensive humanities linguistics. Linguists explore linguistic laws and deduce general patterns, develop and supplement the existing classification. World languages ​​have many common features, therefore, linguistics studies similar trends in languages, analyzes them and derives universal hypotheses that are characteristic of most known languages.