Why are there so many languages in the world?

Question

in the bible it kind of explains why.What about science how do they explain so many different languages.

Answer 1

What you would want to study for that isn't really science but anthropology. Anthropology covers the history of humanity. It's pretty interesting stuff. But the simple answer to your question is that it's because languages change over time. groups of people live apart or move apart and their languages develop independently and then you have people interacting causing languages to influence one another.

And I'm assuming when you mention the bible, you're alluding to the Tower of Babel story. I think you should take most of the stuff you read in the Bible with a grain of salt. Parts of it are thousands of years old and it's gone through countless revisions over time.

Answer 2

people living in different regions and coming through different experience couldn't develop identically therefore there is a variety of languages and cultures

Answer 3

Because people lived in all kinds of places, in different climates, types of land, etc, and cultures formed around that, and languages formed. But the people weren't connected by any technology so every culture has its own language, of course. How does the Bible explain it?

Answer 4

I have no idea either. I'd love to know that too. From where I come from, they say we have 100+ different dialects. Btw, I'm from the Philippines.:)

Answer 5

If you put a group of babies on an island with only deaf-mute adults to raise them to adulthood, they would develop a language of their own.  Ages ago, isolated populations probably did just that.  Even if all humans once spoke the same language, as some linguists actually theorize, it broke down as groups of people migrated and became separated from one another, just as Latin broke down into the Romance languages in historic times.

Answer 6

I would go with, we can see languages developing and changing over time, even over the last 100 years - your grandparents will speak differently to you - and not even understand some of what you say.

In the ancient world, with no mass communication, and where people did not move around that much, groups of people's languages slowly changed over time as ours does. As they were not interacting as much, these changes were all independent, and lots of dialects where formed, that over 1000 years easily change into mutually unintelligible languages.

The bible explanation is not really that good an explanation to go off, I am familiar with the tower of Babel story, and have been since I was a Sunday school child, but even then I knew that that explanation did not explain how some languages sounded like others and others seemed more removed, and the more removed languages were geographically, the more foreign they were to each other.

The way languages 'form' is not a science at all, it is a simple observation at the nature of the way languages change over time. Languages have always changed, and they will continue to change over the next centuries until the languages we speak now, now matter which one you learn, will not make a lot of sense to people 500 years in the future.

Hope this helps

Answer 7

you're question is interesting...i don't know..there are lots of questions that i haven't got any answer...