The Enduring Quest for the Adamitic Language: From Babel to Modern Linguistics

European Enlightenment philosophers in the 17th and 18th centuries dismissed religious origin stories as implausible, seeking naturalistic explanations for life, law, morality, and language origins. The biblical Tower of Babel story suggested a single original human language, the "Adamitic Language." Philosophers like Locke, Rousseau, Condillac, Herder, and Monboddo proposed competing theories. Monboddo, anticipating Darwinian evolution and comparative linguistics, posited that language arose from environmental changes in one location, diversifying as humans spread and cultures diverged. This is the theory of monogenesis, or the "single-origin theory" of language. NativLang's YouTube channel notes that even after naturalizing the story and mapping languages into proto-evolutionary family trees, "Babel still held one intriguing idea over us; that original language." Instead of seeking a mystical Adamitic Language, natural philosophers like Monboddo used comparative linguistics to reconstruct the first human language. In 1866, the Society of Linguistics in Paris, deeming the effort futile, banned discussion of the topic. Joseph Greenberg revived the search in the 20th century, using mass comparison and typology to compare "superfamilies." Merritt Ruhlen later reconstructed 27 proto-words supposedly from the first human language, "Proto-World." NativLang notes that Ruhlen's theory has been critically savaged and "confidently tossed... into the bins of fringe linguistics, pseudoscience... and yet, Babel's first, and biggest claim lingers." Avi Lifschitz notes that questions about language origins remain similar to those posed centuries ago, such as "the precise role of language in the brain and in human perception," a topical question in cognitive science. While reconstructing the original language is largely abandoned, linguists, cognitive scientists, and evolutionary biologists continue to find evidence for the single-origin theory. Noam Chomsky argued that a mutation 100,000 years ago gave rise to language, retaining a "universal grammar" despite divergence into 6,000 different tongues. Original language likely arose in Sub-Saharan Africa, where modern humans evolved 200,000 to 150,000 years ago. In 2011, Quentin Atkinson showed that African languages, especially click languages like Xu, have more phonemes, with languages further from southern Africa having fewer. Atkinson's theory "caused something of a sensation," writes Science Daily, but has faced critique. Despite debates, "the search for the site of origin of language," and its evolutionary mechanisms, "remains very much alive."