define monogenesis hypothesis

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Monogenesis vs. Polygenesis

By following the comments to another question about the evolution of Khoisan languages , I learned that there is a heated debate in Evolutionary Linguistics about the origin of language. Some quick research on Wikipedia shows that there are two major, competing hypotheses:

The monogenesis hypothesis , which holds that there was a single proto-language, estimated to have originated between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago.

The polygenesis hypothesis , according to which languages evolved as several lineages independent of one another.

What is the current state of this debate? What are the most recent (and compelling) pieces of evidence in favor of each side?

• evolutionary-linguistics
• origin-of-language

• 7 As interesting as this questions is, it still feels like trying to infer the shape of an elephant's trunk from the skeleton. –  Mitch Commented Oct 4, 2011 at 13:59
• Joe Martin makes the excellent point in his answer below that we know that as a bare minimum there were at least two instances of language genesis. Even if all spoken languages are related and we count them as one instance of genesis, the genesis of another language has been documented in very recent history, Nicaraguan Sign Language . So either we know this hypothesis is false, or we should change the question to ask only and specifically about spoken languages. For more see Joe's answer . –  hippietrail Commented Apr 2, 2012 at 11:44
• There's actually two questions here: the origin of the human language faculty; the origin of spoken languages. It is quite possible that the language faculty developed once, but spoken languages developed many times (ie as with signed languages). –  Gaston Ümlaut Commented Oct 6, 2012 at 2:25

4 Answers 4

I'm not sure there really even is a "current state of the debate." Most linguists seem to view it as a question that we don't have appropriate models or analyses to address. To start, I would like to bring up some finer points:

"Genetic relatedness" of language isn't even really well-defined. It is entirely possible that throughout the past many millennia, languages had a tendency to borrow very differently than today.

For instance, suppose you were one of a group of a dozen young women from tribe B who married into tribe C, which has about a hundred people, all at the same time. If tribe B had pronouns, and tribe C did not, but inflected verbs for person, say, only in perfective aspect, you all might start using the pronouns from tribe B; if the people in tribe C like the idea enough, they might start using them. Meanwhile, if tribe A had recently imported grammatical number from tribes elsewhere and lent it to tribe B, you might carry that with you through to tribe C.

What we have, in sum, is a mess. Linguists working on pidgins, creoles, and creolization may be our best bet to provide breakthroughs in this.

This often brings me to the analogy of genetics in a biological sense: when we look at DNA within the nucleus of a eukaryotic cell, we're definitely able to determine relatedness; however, in a colony of bacteria/organisms that may not exist anymore, the fact that one organism can "eat" a plasmid from another and maybe even splice it into its own principal DNA ring screws up the notion.

"Human language" isn't really well-defined. It's easy enough to separate what is human language from what isn't, in most cases, in the present day, but the tools we've developed for that from our present-day experience probably aren't adequate to evaluate the situation, say, 300 000—40 000 years ago, or even describe it well. The burden then falls to the inquirer, what is it precisely are you wondering originated once or multiple times?

What if there really was polygenesis of language, but those of the present day all come from a single source (assuming we could even define what we meant by that, and it wasn't silly)? If the last language not from the same source was, say, some North American language isolate that went extinct in the 18th century, after being sparsely documented? This leads to more interesting questions, such as what if, grammatically, it wasn't all that out-of-the-ordinary?

But as long as we're speculating, my bet is that the real answer is a mixture of mono- and polygenesis: there were many periods when tribes maintained close contact with each other, borrowing heavily across the grammatical spectrum throughout a dialect continuum for centuries, and then underwent periods of individuation, due to geographical or cultural effects; during one of these periods, perhaps you would say one of these speech patterns would finally qualify for whatever formal definition you have of "language," and during the next period of mixture, maybe it was borrowed from more than it borrowed. But then, say, a thousand years later, a dialect half a continent away, to which only a small portion of those innovations filtered, innovated enough on its own to where you could call it a "language." This whole scenario is to bear out the point that what we really have is a mess.

(I know I've employed a nonstandard usage of "dialect"; I just didn't want to use the word "language" above, for obvious reasons.)

Some references:

Polygenesis, convergence, and entropy (1996), by Lutz Edzard, takes a comparable view

In Language Polygenesis: A probabilistic model (1995), David Freedman and William Wang point out the flaws in the usual probabilistic argument for monogenesis

(let me know if I should create another question or something):

An article in the New York Times, World's Farmers Sowed Languages as Well as Seeds (2003), bears out the relationship between the success of the comparative method and the presence of agriculture in the cultures being studied. (This relates to my point about dialect continua/grammatical innovation/"membranes" and leads into a response to MatthewMartin's answer.)

+1 to MatthewMartin for mentioning a vital element of the "debate" Otavio Macedo was referring to. Greenberg conducted some of the most groundbreaking and notable research in linguistic taxonomy of the past hundred years, including but by no means limited to the establishment of Niger-Kordofanian and Afro-Asiatic. There always seems to be a lot of unhelpful, not-so-under-the-surface vitriol in many reactions to the Greenberg/Ruhlen research. On the other hand, when in the Amazon review of Ruhlen's book, Larry Trask says

of the 13 Basque items presented on page 65 (as 'language B'), four are wrong, and two more are not even native Basque words, but are words borrowed from Latin or Spanish. And there are also some profound problems concerning the origins and earlier forms of several of the others,

this is a factual objection, which can easily be verified. Similarly, in A Siberian link with Na-Dene languages (which I feel is the most notable finding in linguistic taxonomy of the twenty-first century so far, but that's beside the point), we read

The first person to claim a genetic link specifically between Yeniseic and Athabaskan-Tlingit (Eyak was then unrecognized as a Na-Dene language) was the Italian linguist Alfredo Trombetti (1923). Since that time, many other linguists, notably Merritt Ruhlen (1998) have repeated the same suggestion, though typically including Haida in Na-Dene

Merritt Ruhlen's (1998) proposed cognate sets contain several genuine cognates, among over 75% coincidental look-alikes. These are Ruhlen's comparisons for: head, stone, foot, breast, shoulder/arm, birch/birchbark, old, and burn/cook, and possibly a few others. The correct identification of cognate words for "birch/birchbark" is particularly noteworthy, as this basic vocabulary item is specific to families of the northern latitudes. The finding of these cognates, though it was impossible to confirm them as such in the absence of much more investigation, represents an important contribution,

in other words, (1) Greenberg and Ruhlen are correct that Na-Dené and Yeniseian are relatives, (2) Ruhlen's wordlist is partially correct and helpful, but (3) Haida is not part of their linguistic unit, and (4) 75% of Ruhlen's correspondences turned out to be invalid.

This is getting a little long, so I'll summarize the rest. After his Africa research, Greenberg traveled to Papua New Guinea and to South America (IIRC; if anyone can source this I'd be grateful) and collected Swadesh-type word lists from hundreds of tribes. This, too, is incredibly important research, of a nature not many have had the constitution to undertake. The results of it are, too, very important.

What's the conclusion? More research of this sort needs to be done, to get a lower error rate on the words in the lists. Sound changes need to be added back into the equation with gusto, so that we can find more correct correspondences and throw out more of the ones that don't actually hold.

And on those pronouns: they certainly do hint at the possibility of Eurasiatic (for instance) as a linguistic unit. But what if, again, there were an era where pronouns were the new hot item? Then they could all reduce to loanwords. Again, the conclusion is more research needs to be done.

• 2 I'm pretty sure Greenberg did not collect PNG material himself, and in fact my understanding is that he collected very little primary material himself. –  Gaston Ümlaut Commented Oct 6, 2012 at 2:19

I thought I'd follow up Daniel's excellent comment by giving an example of the problems faced by language reconstruction.

One of the best tools we have for establishing a relationship between two languages is the comparative method. This was developed in the 17th century after people started noticing some deep similarities between Sanskrit, Greek, and some other languages. They hypothesized that they all shared a common ancestor, which they called "Proto-Indo-European". By comparing the way one concept is expressed in different languages, you can come up with correspondences. If you can generalize this correspondence, you can establish a relationship between the two languages.

Let's say you discover a new island, Ba and on this island are two distinct cultures with there own distinct language, Tamo and Danu. We suspect that they share a common linguistic ancestor; the island is so isolated that we don't expect multiple migrations. Still, we can't rule it out.

We proceed by constructing a lexicon of the two languages using basic words, something called a swadesh list, which contains all the words we expect a language to have. So we've done this and developed a reliable list along with their pronunciations. It might look something like this:

So on and so forth.

We immediately notice that these words look similar. 'man' is very similar in both languages: an alveolar stop, /a/, nasal, and rounded back vowel. But, there are some variations. It's a voiced stop in Danu and an unvoiced stop in Tamo. But look: we get the same pattern with 'dog', a voiced alveolar stop in Danu and an unvoiced one in Tamo. If this holds up across a lot of words, then that is strong evidence these languages share a common ancestor, which we might call 'proto-ba'.

There are lots of things that can go wrong with this. Word-borrowings, crib words, and convergent happenstance can all contrive to make two languages appear related when they are not. You can get over excited about your discovery, and start noticing similarities that aren't there. You'll want to do a lot of heavy research about the language and the people that spoke it. Who have they had contact with? Where did they come from? Have there been any major migrations that might have affected the language?

Another problem is that after a certain point, this method stops being useful. Language changes can build up over time, complicated each other or wipe each other out. Our knowledge about the language becomes less and less reliable, and we start losing important pieces to the puzzle. There is a lot of controversy about how Japanese is related to Chinese, for instance, and no one knows where Basque came from.

We'd be fighting through 50,000 years of language change, most of it without any written records and a bare sketch of population movements, and that's a conservative estimate for the age of language. It's really easy to under appreciate just how long a time that is. Proto-Indo-European, for instance, started to split up around 6000 years ago. The invention of writing is around the same age.

There are some linguists that have tried to come up with a sketch of 'proto-world', but they have been met with intense skepticism. Just google "proto-world" and click around on a few of the links.

Merritt Ruhlen is has a good popularly accessible book on the issue and my answer is based on my reading of his book.

The anti-monogensis stance is by and large based on the proto-indo-european research agenda and their methods. It is not controversial that those techniques fall apart at about 5000 maybe even 10000 years worth of inferences. A pretty good accessible book about this research agenda and how it agrees with the archeological record for IE, " The horse, the wheel and language ." The story for PIE is pretty convincing and the reconstructions almost look like a ghost of the original speakers might be able to understand it, albeit this is hardly the level of proof you get in physics or math.

Ruhlen makes the case that

• going further back uses different techniques, e.g. focus on the evolution of pronoun systems, ignore step by step transformations, and these techniques are different than used for reconstructing PIE
• has more modest goals, classification is a much more modest goal (i.e. will not result in a PIE type reconstruction of protoworld)
• has turned into exercise of academics flinging feces at each other (my words, and darn if it isn't appropriate)
• this isn't the first time the academic community reacted violently against a superfamily and then more or less accepted it, using Greenbergs research on the Bantu languages as an example.

And now for my personal opinion-- some of the most vociferous opponents are American Indian language researchers. In that community, so many competing crackpot ideas have been advanced in the past (e.g. the Indians are the lost tribe of Israel and that Amerind languages are some type of Hebrew) that the whole field has irrationally turned against the idea that Amerind languages can be rationally classified into superfamilies.

Now in other fields, genetics, archaeology and anthropology-- the researchers are coming to the same conclusions or coming to conclusions supported by the other fields. The classification of superfamilies is matching the migrations of ancient humans.

I think someone in the world of Economics (Keynes maybe?) said progress in academia is made when there are funerals. I guess that makes sense because no one wants to retract a research paper that they wrote a long while back to take into account a major shift in the understanding of the world.

• 1 +1 for the book references. Already added to my personal reading list! –  Otavio Macedo Commented Oct 4, 2011 at 17:47
• +1 for the quote. I did a bit of googling, and came up with "Science advances one funeral at a time." by Max Planck –  Golden Cuy Commented Oct 14, 2011 at 13:00
• 5 The vast majority of linguists, and especially historical linguists, do not agree with Ruhlen's methods or results. I suggest you read the review of his book by Robert Larry Trask on the Amazon page you link to. –  Gaston Ümlaut Commented Oct 17, 2011 at 5:03
• Democracy doesn't work in science. It's a feces flinging academic fight and enjoyable to watch. Theories that seem to be saying we have no choice but to throw up our hands and say, "Well, we'll never really know" sound too much like religious mysticism to me (God works in mysterious ways, stop asking hard questions!). I'll take a theory that has a high probability of being wrong, but says something over a theory that says, "Well, we just can't know." What is to be learnt from this is the sociology of academics, not so much about the history of language. –  MatthewMartin Commented Oct 17, 2011 at 14:22
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle –  Tomas By Commented Jun 12, 2023 at 19:58

The monogenesis hypothesis , which holds that there was a single language from which all other languages of the world came out , is false. The languages of the world include several hundred signed languages, which one can no more ignore than Austronesian or Agglutinating languages. It is beyond doubt that these signed languages arise spontaneously under certain conditions and have done so many times 1, 2 . In at least one case, ISN of Nicaragua, researchers have documented every step of the mechanism of language creation, not “from nothing”, but by reanalyzing and reorganizing gestural communication into the hierarchical linguistic structure of human language 3 . At bare minimum, language provably arose without input from any existing human language, signed or spoken 4 , once in the 1980s and once in prehistory.

A weaker version of monogenesis for spoken languages only, would be more interesting and would:

• explain how this known mechanism of language genesis would generate spoken language, with its obligatory gestural components; or
• propose some alternative to this known mechanism, and
• explain why it would only operate once in the case of spoken language.

1 : Goldin-Meadow, S. The resilience of language: What gesture creation in deaf children can tell us about how all children learn language. New York: Psychology Press, 2003. 2 : Tomasello, M (2003) Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition, Harvard University Press. 3 Hurford, James, 2001. The Origins of Grammar: Language in the Light of Evolution II. Oxford University Press. 4 Kegl, J., A. Senghas, and M. Coppola 1999 Creation through contact: Sign language emergence and sign language change in Nicaragua In M. DeGraff, (Ed.), Language Creation and Language Change: Creolization, Diachrony, and Development. Cambridge MIT Press, 179-237.

• The answer is hidden in your post: there's no reason to claim signed languages descend from spoken languages, which is why the theory is only limited to spoken: because the two evolved separately. I didn't understand your point 2. –  kamil-s Commented Mar 28, 2012 at 19:16
• 2 Nobody suggested AFAIK that signed languages actually descend from spoken languages. But what people do suggest is that the development of ISN mirrors that of spoken creoles and therefore prima facie both modes of language will have the same sort of constraints on their genesis, and so the existence of a new sign language ab initio strongly implies that new spoken language can readily arise ab initio . –  Colin Fine Commented Mar 30, 2012 at 12:38
• @ColinFine (I'm not taking sides in the discussion. Just a remark to your remark.) You are sure right. But I don't think any of this reasoning is necessary. After all, we do now have a language, so it must have, at some point, arisen ab initio . QED. But, it doesn't mean it must have arisen more than once. Just like life, whether it arose on Earth or came on a meteorite, only needed to appear once. I don't see how signed languages are relevant to the discussion. –  kamil-s Commented Mar 30, 2012 at 20:43
• 3 @KamilS. Because if you broaden the scope from "Spoken language" to "Spoken or signed language" then we have evidence that it appeared more than once. The only way you can assail this is by asserting that signed language is something so different from spoken language that this is irrelevant to any question of genesis of spoken language. That position is logically perfectly self-consistent, but I think it is materially difficult to justify. –  Colin Fine Commented Mar 31, 2012 at 0:07
• 1 @ColinFine The entire discussion, for all I know, cannot be justified materially. But the logic part is interesting. The fact alone that spoken languages now exist is evidence that they can arise ab initio . There is no necessity to include signed languages in the proof, no matter how parallel a case they are. My position was that of Ockham: if there is no necessity to assume language has arisen more than once, we shouldn't. But after I read what you wrote, I realized that if we look at it from the other end, Ockham's razor would be 'don't assume a genetic link where it can't be proven'. –  kamil-s Commented Mar 31, 2012 at 7:25

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58 Monogenesis or polygenesis: a single ancestral language for all humanity?

Johanna Nichols is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught there for most of her career. She works on typology, historical linguistics, languages of the Caucasus (especially Ingush), and language spreads in northern Eurasia.

• Published: 18 September 2012
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This article presents the principles of linguistic geography and palaeodemography, which indicate that language originated gradually over a diverse population of pre-languages and pre-language families. Many linguists discussing the origin of language assume there was a single origin of language and therefore a single ancestral language, a Proto-World, whether or not reconstructable from modern data. The cognitive capacity for symbolic behavior and complex knowledge is likely to have been present in modern humans from the very beginning, but its manifestation in actual transmitted behavior must have depended on population size. Ergativity is the identical coding of subject of intransitive verb and object of transitive verb, with subject of transitive verb differently marked. Languages with ergative case paradigms of nouns include Basque, Georgian, and Chukchi. A singularity is a linguistic phenomenon well attested only in one area or family on earth. Singularities show that highly unusual grammatical properties are hard to innovate, yet hence easier to acquire by diffusion or inheritance than by innovation. One of the examples of a singularity is, click, which are robustly attested in all three of the endemic language families of southern Africa and also well installed in some of the intrusive Bantu languages. They are also found as outliers in two language isolates of the southern Horn of Africa and one Cushitic language there, and the usual interpretation is that these survive from a once larger click-using area that has now been mostly overrun in the Bantu expansion of some 3000 years ago.

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Contemporary version of the monogenetic model of anthropogenesis—some critical remarks from the thomistic perspective.

1. Introduction

2. terminology.

The unitary, or monophyletic, hypothesis of descent will endeavor to trace the first origin of all individual groups of organisms, as well as their totality, to a single common species of Moneron which originated by spontaneous generation. The multiple, or polyphyletic, hypothesis of descent, on the other hand, will assume that several different species of Monera have arisen by spontaneous generation, and that these gave rise to several different main classes (tribes, or phyla). ( Haeckel 1876, 2: 45 )

3. Scientific Point of View

It is technically possible that a species could be founded by a single ancestral breeding pair, just as it is technically possible that a new language could be founded by two speakers. This is not what one would usually expect, however. … Put most simply, DNA evidence indicates that humans descend from a large population because we, as a species, are so genetically diverse in the present day that a large ancestral population is needed to transmit that diversity to us. ( Venema and McKnight 2017, pp. 46, 55 )

humans, as a species, are descended from an ancestral population of at least several thousand individuals. More importantly, the scalability of this approach reveals that there was no significant change in human population size at the time modern humans appeared in the fossil record (~200,000 years ago), or at the time of significant cultural and religious development at ~50,000 years ago. ( Venema 2010, p. 175 )

4. Arguments in Favor of Monogenism

4.1. scripture, patrology, and scholasticism, 4.2. pius xii and humani generis.

When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own. ( Pius XII 1950, p. 37 ). 7

4.3. Paul VI

4.4. mitochondrial eve and y-chromosomal adam.

Though our mitochondrial DNA lineage coalesces to “Mitochondrial Eve” in the relatively recent past, present-day variation of human chromosomal DNA indicates that she was but one m ember of a substantial breeding population. The same logic, mutatis mutandis, applies to the inheritance of the Y-chromosome and the coalescence of human Y-chromosome variation to a single “Adam” in the recent past. While the rapid coalescence of these specially inherited DNA sequences is interesting in its own right, such sequences are not useful measures of ancestral human population sizes because of their unique modes of inheritance. ( Venema 2010, p. 176 ). 12

5. Contemporary Version of the Monogenetic Scenario

5.1. andrew alexander and camille muller.

• The biological species is the population of interbreeding individuals.
• The philosophical species is the rational animal, i.e., a natural kind characterized by the capacity for conceptual thought, judgment, reasoning, and free choice.
• The theological species is, extensionally, the collection of individuals that have an eternal destiny. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says “God created man in his image and established him in his friendship” (CCC, no. 396).

Through the successive unions of the descendants of several primitive couples (including the initial couple of Genesis), a very limited number of generations would be enough for all men to be descended from the first man of which Genesis speaks (without requiring marriages between brothers and sisters), and, just as likely perhaps, for all modern humanity (the only ones the Fathers of the councils would have considered) to be tainted by original sin and saved by Christ. Would not this still be monogenism, less strict, but equally efficacious? ( Muller 1951, p. 304 )

5.2. Kenneth Kemp

The distinction between the biological species concept and the theological one is important, since they are not necessarily co-extensive. Two individuals, one theologically human and the other not, would remain members of the same biological species as long as they were capable of producing fertile offspring. While it would certainly be a theological error to exclude any members of the biological species now living from the philosophical or theological species man (i.e., to hold that they lacked rational souls, or that they were not among those to whom God had offered His friendship), there can be no theological objection to the claim that some one (or two) members of a prehistoric, biologically (i.e., genetically) human species were made sufficiently different from the others that they constituted a new theological species, e.g., by being given a rational soul and an eternal destiny. ( Kemp 2011, pp. 230–31 )

There is an alternative use of Alexander’s distinction which does the work of reconciliation without entailing the problems that his view faces. That account can begin with a population of about 5000 hominids, beings which are in many respects like human beings, but which lack the capacity for intellectual thought. Out of this population, God selects two and endows them with intellects by creating for them rational souls, giving them at the same time those preternatural gifts the possession of which constitutes original justice. Only beings with rational souls (with or without the preternatural gifts) are truly human. The first two theologically human beings misuse their free will, however, by choosing to commit a (the original) sin, thereby losing the preternatural gifts, though not the offer of divine friendship by virtue of which they remain theologically (not just philosophically) distinct from their merely biologically human ancestors and cousins. ( Kemp 2011, pp. 231–32 )

Stage 1—The Foundation: The evolutionary emergence of a biological species having perceptual powers sufficiently complex to allow the infusion of a created human (rational) soul, but able to live an ordinary animal life (with perceptions and emotions, but no intellect) without it. This I will call merely biological man.

Stage 2—Anthropogenesis: Divine creation of rational souls and their infusion into exactly two of those merely biologically human beings, without thereby affecting their interfertility with the rest of the biological species. This produced beings that are philosophically human because they are rational beings, and theologically human because they are, in a conceptually distinguishable sense, beneficiaries of God’s special grace. They are, that is to say, fully human beings.

Stage 3—Succeeding Generations: (1) A certain amount of interbreeding between the fully human beings and their merely biologically human “cousins,” and (2) infusion of rational souls into all (or at least most) of the beings that have even one fully human parent, so that, within a few centuries, the entire biological population will, as a matter of practical, if not mathematical, certainty, be fully human.

This replacement [of Neanderthals in Europe and western Asia as well as other more ancient human-like species] was accompanied by interbreeding among these human-like species such that all non-African populations today inherited roughly 1.5–4 percent of their genomes from their Neanderthal ancestors, and all Melanesians today inherited between 1.9–3.4 percent of their genome from another extinct species of archaic humans called Denisovans. Clearly, our history as a biological species is shaped by migration, interbreeding, and unrelenting adaptation that has generated much diversity within the human population. ( Austriaco 2018, p. 345 ). 19

6. Critical Evaluation of Kemp’s Position

7. conclusions.

While the story of human origins is complex and subject to revision, physical anthropology and molecular biology combine to make a convincing case for the origin of the human species in Africa about 150,000 years ago in a humanoid population of common genetic lineage. … Catholic theology affirms that the emergence of the first members of the human species (whether as individuals or in populations) represents an event that is not susceptible of a purely natural explanation and which can appropriately be attributed to divine intervention. ( International Theological Commission 2004, no. 63, 70 )

Institutional Review Board Statement

Informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Tabaczek, M. Contemporary Version of the Monogenetic Model of Anthropogenesis—Some Critical Remarks from the Thomistic Perspective. Religions 2023 , 14 , 528. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14040528

Tabaczek M. Contemporary Version of the Monogenetic Model of Anthropogenesis—Some Critical Remarks from the Thomistic Perspective. Religions . 2023; 14(4):528. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14040528

Tabaczek, Mariusz. 2023. "Contemporary Version of the Monogenetic Model of Anthropogenesis—Some Critical Remarks from the Thomistic Perspective" Religions 14, no. 4: 528. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14040528

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monogenesis  

Single origin, e.g. of languages. Thus distinguishing especially the theory that the evolution of language in our species originated in a single population; also the theory that pidgins and creoles, or ... ...

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Pidgins and creoles.

• John McWhorter John McWhorter Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.261
• Published online: 26 March 2019

Creole languages have mostly resulted from interactions between Europeans and subordinated peoples amid colonization, trade, and imperialism. Given that the creation of these languages was usually driven as much by adults as children, second-language acquisition has a larger effect upon creole language structures than it does under most other conditions of language change and contact. Namely, it has traditionally been supposed that creole languages begin as makeshift pidgin varieties, expanded from this into full languages. However, various creolists have proposed that most creoles did not in fact emerge in this way; some argue that creoles are relexifications of indigenous languages, while others argue that nothing distinguishes creole genesis from language contact more generally.

• historical linguistics
• language contact
• language genesis

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Mother Tongue Hypothesis

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• Mark Pagel 4  

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Proto-language ; Proto-Sapiens ; Proto-World

Either a person’s native language or a hypothesis about the original human language.

Introduction

The phrase “mother tongue” is often used to indicate someone’s native language, as in “what is your mother tongue?” But in linguistics and anthropology “mother tongue” is a hypothesis about the origins of human language. In this context “mother tongue” refers either to the original or first human language or to the most recent common ancestor of all extant or currently existing human languages.

Monogenesis of Language

Many scenarios for the origin of human language are possible (Fig. 1 ). Here “origin of language” can be understood to mean not just people starting to talk, but to the origins of the apparatus – the cognitive, neurological, and anatomical specializations – that make language possible and the genetic architecture that gives rise to them. Some theoreticians believe that this language faculty arose as a specific...

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Pagel, M. (2016). Mother Tongue Hypothesis. In: Weekes-Shackelford, V., Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3308-1

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Polygenesis vs. Monogenesis — What's the Difference?

Difference Between Polygenesis and Monogenesis

Table of contents, key differences, comparison chart, basic premise, supported fields, implications, example in nature, usage in mythology, compare with definitions, polygenesis, monogenesis, common curiosities, can you give an example of polygenesis in mythology, what is polygenesis in linguistics, what does monogenesis imply in biological evolution, how do polygenesis and monogenesis differ in their view on human races, how does monogenesis contrast with polygenesis in human origins, how does monogenesis explain cultural similarities, what evidence supports the theory of polygenesis in evolutionary biology, what are the implications of monogenesis for genetic research, what role does monogenesis play in the spread of myths and legends, how does the concept of polygenesis challenge traditional views on species evolution, can polygenesis be applied to technological developments, what role does polygenesis play in the diversity of languages, how does polygenesis affect our understanding of cultural development, what are the cultural implications of monogenesis, why is monogenesis significant in the study of languages, share your discovery.

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Definition of monogenism

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International Scientific Vocabulary mon- + -gen + -ism

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[ m uh - noj - uh -niz- uh m ]

• the theory that the human race has descended from a single pair of individuals or a single ancestral type.

Other Words From

• mo·noge·nist noun
• mo·noge·nistic adjective

Word History and Origins

Origin of monogenism 1

Example Sentences

Five-sixths of the public are taught this Adamitic Monogenism as if it were an established truth, and believe it.