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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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.
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