[SPECIAL REPORT DOWNLOAD] History Gems With Dr. Clyde Winters (African Origins of Contemporary Languages)

African Origin of the Worlds Languages

In 2011 Quentin Atkinson argued that all the languages spoken today date back to a single "mother tongue," an ancestral language spoken in Africa 50,000 to 70,000 years ago (Global Post, 2011).Cysouw et al (2012) disagrees with Atkinson, and argues instead maintain 1) “ consonant inventories (and to a lesser extent, vowel inventories) do not seem to be phylogenetically stable enough (10) to conserve the kind of deep signal necessary for the proposed scenario, whereas other, more stable, features show non-African “origins” (fig. S11) “; and 2) “we replicated Atkinson’s method using the UPSID data, but instead of a single origin in western Africa, we found two separate “origins,” one in eastern Africa and one in the Caucasus (fig. S10). “