It seems at first that we learn from our surroundings, and if what we say works in reaching a goal it stays in us. But at the same time, some aspects of language seems innate and in us, and ubiquitous accros cultures, like the some sounds and the word “mama”.
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Yeh it’s learning through positive reinforcement and understanding. It’s by no means innate, the evolution of it is actually quite interesting, humans have existed for between 200-300 thousand years, but we’ve only had language for a much shorter time (I don’t think anyone knows but of the top of my head I think 50 thousand years) and it seems to be an evolutionary happy accident, much like birds had feathers well before they could fly, and it just turns out that they were actually very useful in flying which became a useful trait, humans developed the physical capabilities for language for other reasons, some 300,000 years ago, and then managed to develop a very complex and very useful system (language) much later on.
that’s pretty much all there is to it. that’s how proto-languages formed. as complex thoughts needed to be described, words were created for them. language is shaped by the need to express an idea. there are languages whose number system only has a few numbers because the speakers of that language never needed really big numbers. we’re basically just animals who developed a dedicated language cortex in our brains because it made us more effective at survival.
This is actually not true in most languages the word mama isn’t the same just in a few languages but they are the big popular ones and or are usually related in some way. The only “innate” thing in every language is this strange phenomena called the Bouba/Kiki effect. Where Kiki sounds sharp, pointy, and jagged. And Bouba sounds round, soft, and smooth. In like 70% of languages they have this feature.
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