Why does the world have different languages?

Question

I know that it's probably a dumb question and I'm probably a bit of a dunce for asking this....but I'm wondering why we are all divided with respect to language? I thought I'd ask this here, as this is a language site.

Any ideas?

...and I'd appreciate opinions. Wikipedia articles are not my 'cup of tea'. - Seb79, Jan 19, 2011

I'm just holding my breath, waiting for the religion-related answers. - Gekkosan, Jan 19, 2011

you may now breathe again lol - Kiwi-Girl, Jan 19, 2011

You now have them Gekkosan!. :-) - pacofinkler, Jan 19, 2011

Thank you! Much more interesting now! :-) - Gekkosan, Jan 20, 2011

I thought that this was a language site, too. After reading a couple of answers, I'm automatically leaving this thread. - cogumela, Jan 21, 2011

Answer 1

Anyway, thanks everyone for your answers...I'll look into the links that have been provided.

Answer 2

IF you are not offended by a bit of irreverent, Leftist humor , and IF you want to practice your Spanish a bit, I suggest you listen to Virulo's version of La Torre de Babel. You can also read the lyrics here.

It is very clever, and well worth your time and/or your forbearance.

Very funny. A bit hard to understand when they sing in chourus. The final few minutes are especially good. - samdie, Jan 20, 2011

Answer 3

Because we live in different environment and relate to different things! Therefore we try to create names or identities for these things to enable us easily recognize them.

Answer 4

Just a thought but the more isolated the community the more likely it is that the collective language will become idiosyncratic and unintelligible to the outsider. I'm thinking about accents for example.

I was once a merchant seaman shipping out of the UK and the mixture of people was from all over the land. At first I couldn't understand much of some of the accents but very quickly ones ear adapts and translates.

Also each profession develops an apparently esoteric jargon so that a sort of "shorthand" develops which is only intelligible to the cognoscenti. An outsider finds it difficult to understand the subject under discussion.

I suppose I'm trying to suggest that a close/closed community will probably develop a language that is specialised and not easy for an outsider to understand.

These days with the internet air travel and so on it's likely that there is much more cross-cultural adoption of phrases and definitions from different languages. At the moment English is pretty predominant but I expect it will one day become as "dead" as Latin and we'll all be speaking Chinese and variants of Hindi and Urdu.

Partly tongue in cheek which is perhaps where I should have kept it

In "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco there is a character who speaks a strange mixture of all the different languages he has become acquainted with. He is intelligible never the less. Oh yes, some areas of Semiotics has some interesting observations about language.