"Why do people speak different languages?" - everyone asks this question in childhood, but not many people solve this riddle for themselves, even as adults. From time immemorial, people have tried to answer this question: there is a biblical legend, and folk traditions, and a scientific hypothesis. All these versions are based on one simple fact, which is not difficult to notice even without a special linguistic education: even very different languages very often have a lot in common.
Legends
When asked why people speak different languages, the legend of Australia has its own, very original answer: once peoples were divided into "clean" and "impure". Both were cannibals, but they ate different parts of the body - the “clean” ate meat, the “unclean” ate internal organs. From everyday differences, according to the natives, andLet's go language differences.
The tribes from Indochina have their own vision of the problem: each of the races that make up humanity had its own dialect. There are six such races in total, and all of them, like branches, twist from a giant pumpkin-“progenitor”.
Less exotic, but just as interesting is the version of the Amazon: God separated the languages - he needed this so that, having ceased to understand each other, people began to listen to him more.
In the Iroquois tribe there is a belief that people who once understood each other quarreled and therefore lost their “common language”, spoke different ones. This disunity happened, according to the myth, not even among strangers, but within one family!
There is a beautiful legend about languages belonging to the Navajo Native American tribe. According to their mythology, they are created by a certain deity, which they call "the changing woman." It was she who created them in the first place and allowed them to speak her language. However, later she also created bordering peoples, each of which endowed her own language.
In addition, many nations have beliefs about a single true, correct language. So, the language of the Egyptians was given to them by the god Ptah, and the ancestors of the Chinese were taught their sacred language by the legendary emperors of ancient times.
Bible
There are, however, more familiar explanations for why people speak different languages, according to the Bible (Genesis, chapter 11), most are familiar with one of the most interesting Christian parables about the so-called Babylonian pandemonium.
This legend tells about the sin of the Babylonian kingdom. Its inhabitants were so mired in vanity and departed from obedience to the Lord that they decided to build such a high tower in their city that it would reach heaven - so people wanted to “equal” with God. However, God did not allow the sinners to carry out their plan: he mixed the languages so that they could no longer communicate - so the Babylonians were forced to stop the construction.
Many people know the popular expression "Babylonian pandemonium". It means confusion, confusion, turmoil and general misunderstanding - what happened when people lost their "common language". Thus, about why people speak different languages, the Bible gives a more reasonable answer than archaic folk traditions.
Scientific theory
However, science also provides an equally interesting clue. After all, languages do not just differ from each other, but are also classified by families, branches and groups - depending on the degrees of kinship. So, the languages of Europe come from the Proto-Indo-European language. Today it is not known to us (it can only be reconstructed), and no written monuments in this language have come down to us. But many factors point to its existence.
However, if there was once a common language, why are there so many of them today? The question of why people speak different languages is explained quite simply from a scientific point of view: language, by its very nature, tends to divide almost indefinitely. This happens because of the geographical division. Ever since mankind began to divide intoethnic groups and states, such groups stopped communicating with each other - therefore the language within each group developed in its own way.
Language families
There are more recent divisions into languages. So, for example, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Serbian and many others are related: their similarity is noticeable - more or less - even to the naked eye. It happened because they came from the same language family - Slavic. It would seem that the peoples are so close, and border on each other - but still, so many different ones came out of the Old Slavonic language! It turns out that even large territories and cultural differences (which is worth one division into Catholics and Orthodox!) play such a significant role.
What's happening with languages now
But has language stopped dividing? No matter how. It turns out that even now within a single language, separated by borders, there is a delimitation. For example, the descendants of Russians who remained in Alaska after its transition to the United States today speak a very strange version of Russian, which “ordinary” speakers, if they understand, will obviously have great difficulty.
"Different languages" of one nation
But even not so distant areas have their differences. For example, it's no secret to anyone that "entrance" and "front", "shawarma" and "shawarma" are the same thing, but for some reason both exist. Why does the language change within even one country? All for the same simple reason: St. Petersburg and Moscow, Arkhangelsk and Krasnodar are so far from each other that even in the absence of isolation and existencefederal media their own characteristics inevitably emerge everywhere.
The situation is different, for example, in Germany. If in Russia a resident of the capital is still able to intuitively guess what, for example, "green" in some village dialect, then a German from one region of Germany may not understand a German speaking a different dialect at all.
