Origin of Language

All social animals communicate with each other, from bees and ants to whales and apes, but only humans have developed a language which is more than a set of prearranged signals.

Our speech even differs in a physical way from the communication of other animals. It comes from a cortical speech centre which does not respond instinctively, but organises sound and meaning on a rational basis. This section of the brain is unique to humans.
 
When and how the special talent of language developed is impossible to say. But it is generally assumed that its evolution must have been a long process.

Our ancestors were probably speaking a million years ago, but with a slower delivery, a smaller vocabulary and above all a simpler grammar than we are accustomed to.
  Origins of language

The origins of human language will perhaps remain for ever obscure. By contrast the origin of individual languages has been the subject of very precise study over the past two centuries.

There are about 5000 languages spoken in the world today (a third of them in Africa), but scholars group them together into relatively few families - probably less than twenty. Languages are linked to each other by shared words or sounds or grammatical constructions. The theory is that the members of each linguistic group have descended from one language, a common ancestor. In many cases that original language is judged by the experts to have been spoken in surprisingly recent times - as little as a few thousand years ago.

At first the human beings used o communicate with its fellows just as the animals did by sounds and body languages. But as the development of weapons proceeded languages began to develop. First of all some words were created . A word was used to mean more than one object. Such as the same word was used to mean "water" and "cloud", same word was used to mean the "quantity" and " number". But along with the progress of the productive forces, the languages began to develop in its present form. Probably it took million of years to develop languages in the present form its primitive stages. Actually it took a proper shape during the age of agriculture and animal husbandry.