Where did humanity utter its first words? A new linguistic analysis attempts to rewrite the story of Babel by borrowing from the methods of genetic analysis - and finds that modern language originated in sub-Saharan Africa and spread across the world with migrating human populations.
Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand designed a computer program to analyse the diversity of 504 languages. Specifically, the program focused on phonemes - the sounds that make up words, like "c", "a", and "tch" in the word "catch".
Earlier research has shown that the more people speak a language, the higher its phonemic diversity. arge populations tend to draw on a more varied jumble of consonants, vowels and tones than smaller .
Africa turned out to have the greatest phonemic diversity - it is the only place in the world where languages incorporate clicks of the tongue into their vocabularies, for instance - while South America and Oceania have the smallest. Remarkably, this echoes genetic analyses showing that African populations have higher genetic diversity than European, Asian and American populations.
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