Blog 23 Speaking in tones? Blame it on your genes

Speaking in tones? Blame it on your genes

Through out the generations of human the populations may have influenced languages spoken around the world today, as researchs have proved. The studies/ research says that people who carry variants of around 2 two genes involved in development of the brain tend to speak nontonal languages such as English, while those with a different genetic profile are more likely to speak tonal languages such as Chinese.
In tonal languages, such as chinese, korean, japanese, african languages, there differences in pitch can change the meaning of vowels, consonants and syllables. These types of languages are mainly spoken in South East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Nontonal languages, which prevail in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, use pitch only as a way of conveying emphasis or emotion. Also new discoveries from the Universities of Edinburgh says that tonal languages that sounded more like modern Chinese or Zulu were spoken by the very first human on earth. This Meaning that languages such as english and french came a while after. “The genetic profile that appears to predispose to nontonal languages evolved only about 5,800 years ago, implying that all languages were probably tonal before that”, said one of the researchers.
From what the research results came out “This does not mean that people with one set of genes cannot speak the other type of language, or that you have to be any smarter to learn one of these groups of languages rather than another,” Robert Ladd, who led the research, said. “What we have found, though, suggests that these genes might have a very small effect on individuals, and a larger effect on the populations in which they live. As the language is passed on culturally, it would then be more likely to develop along one path than the other.” After reading this I start to wonder how languages would become after a few centries later. I thought that it was an intresting find that english was not one of the language the very first human beings spoke but rather languages similar to modern chinese.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article1851794.ece