Linguistics and God

I am fascinated by language and by languages; by the mechanics of how we communicate with words and by the thousands of languages that are spoken in the world. It’s easy to take language for granted, but the ability to speak and to be understood is what makes it possible for us to work together. But it also allows us to do far more than simply name things; it gives us the power to describe our goals and communicate our ideas and feelings. These are things we could never express without words.

Some languages are spoken by millions of people, while some are spoken by only a handful. They’re different in their sounds and their alphabets—a few don’t even have alphabets—but languages have striking commonalities. Languages have verbs. They have nouns. They have subjects. They have rules about how sentences are put together. They have rules about what letters can be combined and whether they can be used at the beginning of words or the end of words or both. Languages differentiate whether we are talking about “us” or “you”—and many languages differentiate between a single “you” and a plural “you” (and may also go so far as to dictate which word to use when “you” is someone I know well, versus a more formal “you”).

Linguists devote their lives to studying language, and many specifically study its origins. They wonder how humans first began to speak, and when, and where. Basing their study on the idea of evolution, they usually think that perhaps humans spontaneously developed the ability to speak in one place, tens of thousands of years ago…or perhaps, given the number of different languages, humans spontaneously began to speak in multiple places. Some argue for one common “mother language” that all languages came from; others find that theory inadequate and argue instead for a few original languages, which then diversified as peoples traveled and met each other.

I confess: I am not a linguist. However, when I read about language and languages, it reminds me of the Creator. Because what I do know about language is that my kids didn’t spontaneously learn it. They had to hear the words their father and I spoke to them. They listened to the conversations that happened around them. They progressed from cries to babble to speech, like every kid does—through trial and error and lots of observation and teaching. Having watched them struggle to communicate with us and with each other, I find it impossible to believe that somewhere in the past, some human-like creature spontaneously started talking, and another one spontaneously understood.

Language requires a speaker and a listener—one to talk and one to understand. It’s not inherited; it requires a teacher and a set of rules. While languages do evolve and change over time, they had to start somewhere. What better place to start than with the Creator, who utters the first spoken lines in the Bible? The Bible also gives an account of how the languages multiplied, with the incident of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9). Instead of a mystery, a clear explanation: once, there was one language, given by the Creator to the created. When it became necessary to diffuse people across the face of the earth, God turned that one language into many languages. And, intriguingly, there is a prophecy that indicates that in the future, those many languages may again become one (Zephaniah 3:9).  

Spoken and written communication is indeed a marvelous gift, one that allows us to collaborate and share our inner worlds with each other. The story of language has a number of twists and turns and interesting sidebars, but the beginning of it is no mystery: it is the gift of God.