• Question: Bonjour! How can we understand our own language but dont understand other languages and why don't we just use one language? Thanks

    Asked by fjaafar to James_M, Ceri, Arttu on 22 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Arttu Rajantie

      Arttu Rajantie answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      I am really not an expert on this, but I think that this is because in the past people did not have ways to communicate or travel easily over long distances. Therefore they only talked with people living nearby, and would therefore develop their own local dialect or language.

      Some languages that still exist separated from each other such a long time ago that we cannot even know for sure if they share a same origin or whether they perhaps developed fully independently. One example is my own mother tongue Finnish, which is so different from most other European languages that linguists have not been able to determine where it is at all related.

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