WE DON'T ASK OURSELVES where languages come from because they just seem to be there: French in France, English in England, Chinese in China, Japanese in Japan, and so forth. Yet if we go back only a few thousand years, none of these languages were spoken in their respective countries and indeed none of these languages existed anywhere in the world. Where did they all come from? |
Linguist Merritt Ruhlen, author of The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue, details the factors that determine the development and evolution of regional dialects . |
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