Why Do We Talk?

I was going to blog about a talk I went to last night but actually that can wait. It ain't breaking news (although it featured an interesting conversation between an eccentric artist and a clever writer if that whets your appetite).

Speaking of conversations and talks, I highly recommend watching Why Do We Talk, a Horizon programme which will be on BBC iPlayer until next Tuesday. It looks at how us humans started learning language.

Scientists are gradually piecing together the first map of the complex language functions in the brain. Did you know that babies listen to their mums in the womb? They get to know her tone and cadence which is why, in the programme, a one day old baby's brain responds to her mother's call "hi baby" but not a computer's.

Apparently the origin of language lies in our genes. There's a single gene that controls the tiny movements in our faces that enable us to talk. If we're born without it then we can't talk properly. All vertebrates have this gene but two tiny changes to it mean that we can communicate verbally but other animals can't. And probably around the time these changes happened (like waaaaaay back, thousands of years ago) is when evidence of art and culture started appearing. How cool.

The programme had many more examples to bring it all to life, like Christopher who "collects languages like butterflies". He's autistic and can speak 20 languages. It also trotted out some well-I-never-type stats - there are more than 6000 languages in the world and 800 of those can be found in Papua New Guinea alone. Worthwhile banking for future pub quizes methinks.

On a separate, but sort of related, note I've just started dipping into The History Of The English Language again, like you do (it's a reference book which has been lying dusty on my bookshelf for yonks). Did you know limousine is so called after the name of a province in France? Tabasco sauce is named after the Mexican river Tabasco, and the Charleston dance after the American city. And we can't forget the good old hungry Earl of Sandwich who first invented our lunchtime staple.

But back to the programme…watch it to find out what the forbidden experiment is.