Spoken language uses sounds to communicate through a shared vocabulary and grammar. Its origins are unclear, but humans developed the anatomy of speech about 100,000 years ago. Written language uses visual symbols, while sign language uses body movement. Gesture-based languages may have predated spoken language.
Spoken language is a form of communication in which people use their mouths to create recognizable sounds. These sounds come from a large vocabulary of sound sequences with agreed-upon meanings. These sequences of sounds are called words and each one represents one or more objects or concepts. A shared grammar and syntax allows the speaker to transform these words into statements that listeners will be able to understand.
The origins of the spoken language remain unclear, although they are the subject of ongoing research by anthropologists. Skeletal evidence suggests that early hominids used some form of vocal communication, but it’s not certain when this became complex enough to be considered spoken language. Vocal communication occurs in many species of animals, from birds to cetaceans, but this communication does not appear to possess the grammar and vocabulary that would qualify it as a language. A 2006 study in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America suggests that the anatomy of speech developed in humans about 100,000 years ago. The development of written language is extremely difficult to trace in archaeological or fossil remains because, unlike written language, it leaves no physical traces.
Spoken language is not the only form of human communication. Written language conveys meaning through the use of writing, where visual symbols correspond to the meanings and sounds of words. Many languages have both a written and a spoken form, although there are a number of languages that have a spoken form but no written form. For example, the Mosuo, an ethnic group who live near Lugu Lake in China’s Yunnan Plateau, have an indigenous language that is only spoken. The reverse is much rarer, although some ancient languages, such as Latin, have spoken forms that are essentially extinct while their written forms have survived in the archaeological record.
While spoken language uses sound to convey meaning and written language uses images, sign language uses body movement to communicate. Modern sign languages developed from systems intended to communicate between people who could not use spoken language, either because their hearing or speech was impaired or because cultural factors prevented them from speaking. This was the case with medieval monks, who used signs to communicate during times when they weren’t allowed to speak. One theory of the origin of language, gestural theory, suggests that gesture-based languages actually predate the origin of spoken language.
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