98. Did the Pygmies Ever Have a Language of Their Own?

Sorry for the sudden change of pace, but a thought occurred to me the other day that won't let me alone. I've been thinking a lot about African pygmy music, as anyone who's been following this blog knows. But now I'm thinking about their language. Their music is certainly special, but their language is also special -- that is, their lack of language, the odd fact that every African pygmy group I know of speaks a language related to that of neighboring Bantu, Sudanic, or Nilotic tribes. It's been assumed that they lost their original language through some process of assimilation with the farming groups they've developed symbiotic relationships with. But this hypothesis runs into a big problem no one seems to have noticed. It is in violation of one of the great principles of science, Occam's Razor, which demands that any scientific model provide the simplest solution that accounts for all the evidence. (This should not be confused with the principle of "parsimony," by the way. Parsimony is one of many possible ways of organizing data, but even the most parsimonious solution, in order to be regarded as valid, must conform nevertheless to Occam's Razor -- i.e, it must still be the simplest solution possible that accounts for all the evidence.)

To assume that each and every pygmy group in various parts of Africa went through the same linguistic "evolution," relinquishing an original language to replace it with that of their neighbors, goes counter to both Occam and common sense, because we would have to assume that in each and every individual and unrelated case more or less the same process occurred.

It's true of course that certain groups in various parts of the world have lost their language when they were conquered and assimilated by more powerful groups. But the pygmies were neither conquered nor assimilated. Though often regarded as vassals, they have apparently always been able to retreat into the forest, where they can practice their own rituals, hunting methods, music, dance, etc. So why not their own original speech?

I find it intriguing that other hunter-gatherer groups didn't lose their original languages in the same way. The Bushmen have their own language, possibly the oldest, as do the Hadza and Sandawe, yet all these groups have also developed symbiotic relations with neighboring farmers and pastoralists.

If the pygmies never had a language of their own, what could that mean? what light might that shed on the question of the origins of both "modern" humans and language?

Most of the evidence appears to point to both pygmies and bushmen as representative, genetically, of our oldest fully human ancestors. Chen et al., in a well known paper, estimated the age of separation of the Biaka pygmies from the founding group to be anwhere from 76,000 to over 100,000 years ago (on the basis of their mtDNA). Let us suppose, then, that the group of "modern" humans destined to be the ancestors of everyone now alive on this planet, spoke some language, say, 120,000 years ago. We would be almost forced to assume that, when the Pygmies diverged from this group, they would have spoken some derivative of that language. But if they did, then we must also assume, following the path of the mighty Occam, that at least some of these pygmy groups would have retained some form of that language -- as did the Bushmen, Hadza, etc.

Let us now go back to 120,000 ya, and make the opposite assumption, that the founding group had not yet developed language. So when the Pgymies diverged from the main group they too would have been without language. Continuing with the same line of thought, we can speculate that language may have been invented after the period when the Pygmies broke off, sometime between 76,000 and 100,000 ya (assuming Chen et al are on the right track). So by the time the other groups, ancestral to the Bushmen, Hadza, etc., diverged, they would have been in possession of language, while the pygmies were not. And at this point we can allow many thousands, indeed tens of thousand of years to pass.

Another clue pointing in the same direction: we have a very rich tradition of symbolic rock art in Africa, dating back at least 40,000 years, which most archaeologists have associated with Bushmen history (though such art is not being produced today). No such art has been, to my knowledge, ever attributed to the ancient pygmies. There is thus, apparently, no real evidence that they were in possession of language during the paleolithic period.

Continuing to speculate, in an equally rigorous Occamian fashion: in order for the above to make sense, the pygmies could not have had language at all until after the Bantu expansion, of 2,000 to 4,000 years ago. If they had developed or borrowed any language prior to that time, that would be the language that at least some of them would now be speaking. It would seem then, that in order for the present pattern to have manifested itself, the first language spoken by any pygmy people must have been a language borrowed from the neighbors with whom they currently interact. Each time a pygmy group encountered Bantu, Sudanic, or Nilotic speaking people, they would have learned what language is from them.

If the above can be taken seriously, it could give us a clue as to when language originated -- i.e., some time between the divergence of the pygmies and the divergence of the Bushmen.

Am I going to hate myself in the morning? We'll just have to wait and see.