Speaking in tongues

The long debate about of how we talk and how we started has a few rounds to go yet.

Humans can make well over 1500 possible speech sounds, according to one estimate, but no language uses more than about 10% of them. The women of one Amazonian tribe, the Pirahã, use only seven consonants and three vowels (the men, you might not be surprised to hear, get another consonant). Another tongue spoken by about 4000 people in Botswana and Namibia may have 159 consonants; English, by comparison, has far fewer, though it has about 20 different vowel sounds, making it a doddle to pick up the basics and a devil to master.

But how did we come to make all these sounds, and fuse them into six thousand languages? Michael Corballis is here to help. The wellsprings of language, mechanically, cognitively, evolutionarily, is the special interest of Corballis, emeritus professor at the Psychology Department of the University of Auckland. His 2002 work was titled From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language. That book concluded that it developed from gesture rather than vocalisations.

Science moves on a lot in 15 years – for example, in evolutionary biology. In The Truth About Language, Corballis takes us for a brisk stroll through the neurolinguistic savannah. He covers a lot of ground, from linguistics to theory of mind, from displacement to genetics, from human development (baby brain growth and our unique period of adolescence) to social intelligence, from the workings of our memory to the apparently unsquashable notion of the aquatic ape, from stories to play, religion and art.

Corballis wrestles Noam Chomsky to the ground on universal grammar (though this tussle has many rounds to go: an MIT linguist has just counterpunched in a new book, using Japanese and Basque). On the subject of whether language is the stuff of thought, he seems to share many of the views of primatologist Frans de Waal, who has acknowledged that we are the only linguistic species but that language tells far from the whole story of communication and thought. Though there are deep cognitive gaps, new findings reinforce continuity with our nearest animal cousins. For instance, though no one’s quite mentioning Planet of the Apes, it was recently reported that baboons can produce five vowel-like sounds.

It’s not much of a spoiler to say that Corballis arrives at much the same conclusion as in his previous book. He amasses a stack of evidence and cites a daunting range of titles – though not Joseph Henrich’s excellent 2015 survey of social intelligence. Personally, however, I can’t get past the idea that gesture and vocalisation evolved together, especially if you see toddlers at daycare simultaneously pointing and declaring.

Still, the book is an engaging excursion, straddling well the needs of mainstream and more academic readers. The design is first-rate. A few American spellings and the odd error have made it through the editing process, but if you can forgive those and the odd granddad joke, it’s an excellent tour d’horizon.

How did we come to make all these sounds, and fuse them into six thousand languages?

THE TRUTH ABOUT LANGUAGE, by Michael Corballis (Auckland University Press, $29.99)

Mark Broatch is the author of the language guide In A Word, among other titles.