Why Does The World Speak Different Languages?

Why does the world have so many different languages?

A World of Variety

I think we’d all be pretty bored if everyone was the same. If all of us were no better than cookie-cutter people and just like all others, it’d be pretty boring. Just look at a flower garden and see how the variety of flowers enhance the beauty of those around them and it makes it clear why variety does make life more meaningful. I see that in the human race. What magnificent varieties of the cultures, languages, and peoples there on the earth, but the question is, how did there come to be so many different languages with so much difference? Linguist’s experts who have studied language have tried to find the origin of language but have thus far been unable to locate a time or place where humans first began to utter a known language. What also puzzles the experts is how so many different languages came into being. There really is no concrete evidence to tell us why. It seems reasonable that at one time, just after language was first spoken, that all humans would have spoken the same language, so how did they branch out into so many radically different tongues?

Dialects

Maybe you’ve heard someone from the South and they speak differently than you do, although they’d say that about you if you’re from up North speak differently too, but the differences in dialect seem to grow with distance. For example, if you’re from Chicago, you call your father, “dad” but in some parts of the South, it’s “pa,” so depending on where you live, your vocabulary will vary somewhat from where others live. When I was young, a carbonated drink was called a soda in Florida while in the North it was called a “pop.” It’s somewhat like what realtors say, “Location, location, location.” It just depends on where you live, because even from birth, you’re classically conditioned to respond to the sights and sounds around you, almost like Pavlov’s dogs. Some believe this is how languages developed. It took place very slowly, and after certain people groups began to grow and cluster together, they developed their own local vernacular. Many different dialects exist all over the world and even within the nations themselves (e.g. U.S), so is this how the world began to speak many different languages? Did they begin to imitate the sounds around them? Is it strictly environment?

Beginnings

For the Christian, they believe that language was part of God’s creation because not long after “God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1), He created the rest of the living organisms, but He saved man until the sixth day of the week, where it says “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27). The summary of Genesis 1 is that God was before the beginning of matter and that He spoke and it existed (Psalm 33:9), then mankind was placed in the Garden of Eden to tend it. Obviously, language was part of the creation of Adam as language was immediately being understood and already being spoken between God and Adam (Gen 2:16-17; Gen 3:9-13). The biblical view is that the origin of language came with the origin of man.

The Tower of Babel

Genesis 11 confirms for us that from the earliest time in humanity’s history, there was one language (Gen 2, 3), just as it says in Genesis 11:1-2 that “the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there” (Gen 11:1-2). They planned to build a huge civilization, the world’s first superpower, and said, “let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth” (Gen 11:4). They wanted to reach heaven to try and overthrow God! God had seen this before, just before the flood when all anyone ever thought about was to do evil (Gen 6:5), so God said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech” (Gen 11:6-7).

Conclusion

The conclusion is “the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth” (Gen 11:8-9). Could you imagine how they could have ever cooperated with one another under those circumstances? By God’s divine providence, there was one language and then many, for if they had stayed at Babel, there’s no telling to what heights of evil they might have risen too. That’s why God dispersed them and confused their language and why we have so many different languages in the world today.

Article by Jack Wellman

Jack Wellman is Pastor of the Mulvane Brethren Church in Mulvane Kansas. Jack is also the Senior Writer at What Christians Want To Know whose mission is to equip, encourage, and energize Christians and to address questions about the believer’s daily walk with God and the Bible. You can follow Jack on Google Plus or check out his book Teaching Children the Gospel available on Amazon.