Language Quiz
Few things reveal more about you than the way you talk. For experts on dialects a few diagnostic clues from a person’s speech can often enable them to pinpoint that person’s origins with remarkable precision. Perhaps the most famous test of this sort is the one recounted in the book of “Judges” in the Hebrew Bible. The Gileadites identified fleeing Ephraimites, whose army they had defeated, by their ability to pronounce the word “shibboleth” as the Gileadites did. The Gileadites executed anyone who, when pronouncing “shibboleth,” replaced the initial sh-sound with an s-sound as the Ephraimites were wont to do.
In December the New York Times published a language quiz with far less dire consequences. On the basis of American readers’ responses to the quiz’s twenty-five questions, the system could ascertain where in the United States respondents had spent their formative years when they acquired their particular dialect of American English. For those who had not moved during childhood and adolescence, the system was particularly adept at identifying where respondents had grown up. (Try it!)
Dunbar’s Hypothesis
Robin Dunbar, the University of Oxford anthropologist in his delightful book, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language has argued that language evolved, principally, as a means for solving a time management problem. Maintaining good social connections poses a serious problem when groups get too large. For species that rely upon grooming to build social bonds (as, for example, most monkeys and primates do) living in large groups means individuals can no longer groom everyone without starving to death, literally, for want of enough time to obtain the necessary food. Dunbar holds that only some species of our genus Homo and, most conspicuously, modern Homo sapiens sapiens (us!) began, during prehistoric times, living in groups the sizes of which far exceeded the limit he calculated on available grooming time. Language provides a verbal means for social grooming. It allows individuals to soothe their comrades both in parallel and at a distance. (We refer to that latter accomplishment these days as a “shout-out.”) Thus, he hypothesized that language evolved as a solution to this problem of maintaining social bonds in large groups.
Dialects and Religious Splintering as Small Scale Prehistoric Phenomena
Dunbar’s proposal is based, in part, on his earlier landmark discovery that among primates a species’ average brain size correlates with its group size. Dunbar’s measurements suggest that humans’ brains are large enough to keep track of the crucial social relations among somewhere between 120 and maybe as many as 180 individuals. Dunbar maintains that this is why, even in modern, large-scale societies, large organizations, such as armies and corporations, are regularly sub-divided into smaller units that fall within this range. The evidence from human prehistory as well as the findings about the few remaining hunter-gatherer groups today point to similar natural upper limits to group size. When human groups exceeded this size, the presumption is that they underwent fission. The relative isolation of the resulting groups from one another permitted linguistic variations. The linguistic consequence of the fission is to create dialects, which also eventually come to serve as markers of group identity.
Just as language use tends to exhibit variation across large groups of humans, religious belief and practice tends to vary as well. In an intriguing recent paper Dunbar conjectures that the social dynamics that drove language variation inform human groups’ penchants for religious splintering too. The limits on the size of groups that human brains can manage socially caused large groups to divide in human prehistory. Those divisions created smaller bands, which, over time, generated linguistic andreligious variations, both of which became markers of group identity. In short, Dunbar speculates that the underlying cause is the same. Subsequently, after the invention of agriculture, large social groups created tools such as literacy for bringing some standardization to language, on the one hand, and to religious belief and practice, on the other. Before that, though, Dunbar suspects that both language and religion underwent repeated splintering as a consequence of the limitations of bare brains to keep any larger groups together.