I was looking into the etymology of Lake Ontario, when I learned that it derived from the Huron “Ontari’io”, which got me thinking about how different languages even came about. Of course language changes, with expressions, slang, and such. But some languages are completely different in pronunciation of each letter, and some don’t even use the Latin alphabet at all.
How did we begin speaking different languages? Why might humans not have established one language thousands of years ago?
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Geography. The world was vast before even 1995. Before intercontinental telephony mid 1900s it would take months for someone from Europe to communicate with someone in the Americas.
Most people never ventured even 15 miles from their place of birth before the industrial revolution
We probably did. But the geographical separation of different groups of humans would have led to different dialects that have lost contact with each other for long enough that they are no longer mutually intelligible.
This happens because language changes over time, and without regular contact, different places would experience different changes.
A group of humans on one side of the world and a group of humans on the other develop the ability for language at the same time, but because they have no contact with each other, their languages will share nothing in common. Ultimately the arrangements of sounds and how they’re marked in writing are completely arbitrary.
As you mention, languages are always evolving, in part because they’re constantly trying to balance the opposing goals of ease of production and ease of perception, and in part because children may conceive of the things their parents say slightly differently than their parents do and start to use the language in ways their parents never would. When a language is spoken by separate communities whose average members don’t interact much with each other, small differences in how they change can accumulate over time such that eventually the separate communities can’t understand each other and are now speaking separate languages. This process has been going on since the dawn of language – probably on the order of 100,000 years ago, though that’s a very rough estimate – which gives more than enough time for languages to diverge so much you can’t tell that they were ever related, several times over.
> But some languages are completely different in pronunciation of each letter, and some don’t even use the Latin alphabet at all.
The question of how languages are *written* is quite separate from questions about languages themselves! It’s usually best to think about writing as a very peripheral add-on module that doesn’t have much at all to do with the rest of a language – all writing is is a way to encode spoken language. Writing can change or not change quite independently of the spoken language, especially since writing is much more often the target of intentional, conscious change than spoken language is. Nonetheless, the history of what languages use what writing systems is quite fascinating; it just has basically nothing to do with the history of the spoken languages most of the time.
The general gist of the history of writing is that it was invented independently in three or four places (Sumeria, northern China, Mesoamerica, and maybe Egypt if that wasn’t inspired by Sumerian writing), and the vast majority of today’s scripts are (probably) descendants of Egyptian through Phoenician – the Greeks borrowed Phoenician letters, the Etruscans borrowed Greek letters, and the Romans borrowed Etruscan letters; while on the other side Aramaic speakers borrowed Phoenician letters and then Indians borrowed Aramaic letters. The vast prevalence of Roman letters has to do with the Roman empire spreading them in Europe, and then Europe’s subsequent cultural domination spreading them across the world. Nonetheless, a large part of the world’s population writes in non-Latin scripts.
There are several fields of linguistics that study this phenomenon. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_change)
There are several causes.
Economy: generally language becomes more “efficient” over time. Think going to -> gonna. The thing is, different speech communities may start with the same language (say Latin), they don’t always adopt the same efficiencies. That lead to Castilian Spanish becoming different from Portuguese and French, though they are all derived from latin. [Linguists compare the traits of similar languages to try to identify the traits of the ancestral language.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method). I’m sorry, but I’m not well versed enough in this area to provide any good examples.
Outside contact: English is a famously a hodgepodge of Germanic language with Norse, and later normal french/latin influences. The language changed through the influence of contact with other language speakers. That’s how we got the terms beef, pork, and mutton, for example.
There are also cases of language communities simply changing conventions. For example, English has [the Great Vowel Shift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift) where the way we pronounce or vowels changed dramatically over the course of a few generations.
I’ve always thought that as people explored and settled new areas, their food sources changed. So, a forest people who have been eating red meat and root vegetable moving to the coast or desert would chew new food differently. Build different muscles and mouth structures, and begin to pronounce words differently.
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