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Any human can potentially learn any language. Any American baby adopted by Quechuan speaking parents would grow up speaking fluent Quechuan with no difficulty. Language, we now realize, is an intrinsic part of being human, and is biologically programmed into the species. This chapter discusses language, one of the three traits that best distinguish cultural values (religion and ethnicity are the other two that we discuss in this text).

Historians generally agree that this powerful communication system emerged around 100,000 years ago, probably in the east of Africa, according to majority opinion. Humans moved northward into Asia Minor maybe 50,000 years ago, then spread around the world. As humans traveled, languages split and proliferated.

As we have done in previous chapters of this text, Chapter 5 looks at where different languages are used, and how these languages can be logically grouped. Then we examine why languages have distinctive distributions. We will also take a careful look at the contradictory trends of globalization and local diversity.

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