Clicks, genetics, and “proto-world” from a linguistic perspective

Abstract

”Why genetics and linguistics need each other: genes and clicks from a linguistic perspective” Knight et al. (2003) have argued, largely from a genetic perspective, that clicks “may be more than 40.000 years old” (p.470) and thus “are an ancient element of human language” (p.471). This has nourished the hypothesis, expressed especially in popular science, that clicks were a feature of the ancestral mother tongue. The claim by Knight et al. (2003) is based on the observation that two populations in Africa speaking languages with click phonemes, namely Hadza in eastern Africa and Ju|’hoan in southern Africa, are maximally distinct in genetic terms: both Y chromosome and mtDNA data suggest that the two “are separated by genetic distance as great [as] or greater than that between any other pair of African populations” (p.464). It is also claimed that the only explanation for the presence of clicks in the two groups is inheritance from an early common ancestor language, hence the alleged, very great age of clicks in general. Other explanations for the clicks of Hadza and Ju|’hoan, in particular independent development and language contact, are explicitly excluded by the authors. This paper seeks to demonstrate on the basis of purely linguistic evidence that this view cannot be accepted: both independent innovation and contact-induced transmission of clicks are attested. The click system of Hadza in particular will be shown to have a profile which is quite compatible with an explanation in terms of language contact. The linguistic evidence thus does not imply that clicks go back to a language spoken at the dawn of human evolution; there is no good reason to exclude the possibility that the emergence of clicks in Africa represents a far later episode in the diversification of human speech. More reliable hypotheses about the early development of language can be reached only by truly interdisciplinary research in the disciplines concerned, here genetics and linguistics.

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