What the Tower of Babel Proves About Language

 

Nobody knows exactly how many languages there are in world, partly because of the difficulty of distinguishing between a language and a sub-language (or dialects within it).  One authoritative source that has collected data from all over the world, The Ethnologue, listed the total number of languages as 6809.

The Bible’s explanation of the origin of multiple human languages is provided in the Tower of Babel incident recorded in Genesis 11:1–9. Scripture simply and confidently asserts: ‘Now the whole earth had one language and one speech’ (11:1).  When Noah and his family stepped off the ark, they spoke a single language that was passed on to their offspring.  As the population increased, it apparently remained localized in a single geographical region.  

Consequently, little or no linguistic variation ensued.  But when a generation defiantly rejected God’s instructions to scatter over the planet, God miraculously intervened and initiated the major language groupings of the human race.  This action forced the population to proceed with God’s original intention to inhabit the Earth (cf. Isaiah 45:18) by clustering according to shared languages. Duursma correctly noted: ‘The Babel account suggests that several languages came into existence on that day. It is presented as a miraculous intervention by God’.

This depiction of the origin of languages coincides with the present status of these languages.  The available linguistic evidence does not support the model postulated by evolutionary sources for the origin of languages.  Many evolutionary linguists believe that all human languages have descended from a single, primitive language, which itself evolved from the grunts and noises of the lower animals.

The single most influential ‘hopeful monster’ theory of the evolution of human language was proposed by the famous linguist from MIT, Noam Chomsky, and has since been echoed by numerous linguists, philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists.  Chomsky argued that the innate ability of children to acquire the grammar necessary for a language can be explained only if one assumes that all grammars are variations of a single, generic ‘universal grammar’, and that all human brains come ‘with a built-in language organ that contains this language blueprint’.

Explaining this ‘innate ability’, a ‘universal grammar’, and the ‘built-in language organ’ of humans has proven to be, well, impossible!  Steven Pinker, the eminent psychologist also of MIT, candidly lamented this very fact in his best-selling book, How the Mind Works.  In addressing the failure of ‘our species’ ’ scientists to solve these types of plaguing, perennial problems, he wrote:

‘The species’ best minds have flung themselves at the puzzles for millennia but have made no progress in solving them.  Another is that they have a different character from even the most challenging problems of science.  Problems such as how a child learns language or how a fertilized egg becomes an organism are horrendous in practice and may never be solved completely’ [emphasis added].

​However, the existing state of human language nevertheless suggests that the variety of dialects and sub-languages has developed from a relatively few (perhaps even less than twenty) languages.  These original ‘proto-languages’—from which all others allegedly have developed—were distinct within themselves, with no previous ancestral language.  Creationist Carl Wieland rightly remarked: ‘The evidence is wonderfully consistent with the notion that a small number of languages, separately created at Babel, has diversified into the huge variety of languages we have today’.