Mother of all Mother Tongues

University of Auckland psychologist Quentin Atkinson has undertaken a first-of-its-kind linguistic analysis suggesting that human language arose only once. Atkinson traced language’s origin by breaking down 54 world languages into their smallest components, called phonemes. Atkinson said the world’s 6, languages descended from a single ancestral tongue spoken by early southern African humans between 5, and 7, years ago. The Mother of all Mother Tongues is known as Khoisan, a family of the Kalahari Bushmen click language. The Wall Street Journal said Atkinson’s theory was being hailed. “It’s a wonderful contribution and another piece of the mosaic,” Ekkehard Wolff, professor emeritus of African Languages and Linguistics at the University of Leipzig in Germany, told the WSJ. Atkinson’s work has been published in the prestigious journal Science.