Charles Darwin’s views on language were inseparable from his views on the evolution of humanity’s brain capabilities as well as on the origins of racial distinctions – topics that will form a significant share of this discussion. Our starting point, however, is Darwin’s fundamental theory of how language originated. It was universally acknowledged in Darwin’s day, as in our own, that language use was a key aspect of what it means to be uniquely human, and so Darwin was obliged to explain how language could have emerged via gradual and naturalistic means, as an essential part of human evolution. On this and related topics we find Darwin working with a few simple ideas that he held throughout his career, even though he elaborated those ideas in increasingly complex ways.

Exposition in Descent

Darwin’s main views on the origin of language appear in a ten-page section on “Language” found in chapter 2, on the “Mental Powers of Man,” of his book The Descent of Man (1871a, 1:53–62). The section begins with preliminary observations on how communication among higher animals often approximates language. There are also remarks about language’s hybrid nature: it is part instinct and part invention. Darwin was careful, however, to qualify his use of the latter term: “No philologist [i.e., linguist] now supposes that any language has been deliberately invented; each has been slowly and unconsciously developed by many steps” (1:55). As to the specific means of origination, Darwin said: “I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification, aided by signs and gestures, of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man’s own instinctive cries” (1:56). Here Darwin built on two standard eighteenth-century conjectures about the way early humans could have formulated their first words. Both theories involved vocal mimicry: the difference lay in what was said to be imitated. One emphasized sounds in nature such as animal cries; the other emphasized humans’ own spontaneous grunts, groans, and mating calls (Stam 1978). Darwin in essence combined these two perspectives.