Questions for Speaking in Tongues: The History of Language

1. What may be the relationships between environmental prehistory (climate change), human evolution, and the development of language?

2. Film and reading: what does brain size have to do with language?

3. Paleo-history of migration: what do some linguists think about the function of language in the context of human movement? Does this refute Dunbar’s social intelligence hypothesis?

4. What connection may there be between language and our move to bipedalism?

5. What is “the great leap forward,” and what might language have to do with it?

6. Why is there such interest (and skepticism) about uncovering an original human language? How far back can we safely trace linguistic history?

7. What does this search have to do with the monogenesis hypothesis?

8. Why would some people really want to see Hebrew (or Sanskrit) as the original language?

9. What is interesting about Koi San click language?