Is Language a Living Organism?

There are multiple intriguing parallels between language and biological organisms, which may come as no great surprise, since language is produced by living beings. No, the surprise comes when we see how the taxonomy used to classify plants and animals can also be applied to languages.

We classify living things on many levels, from domain down to species and even narrower down to subspecies, varieties, and other categories like “sport.” The charts to represent this are traditionally like trees, with multiple branching going on towards the top, paring down as the organism’s identity gets more specific; a “tree of life” as it’s called.

Our branch of the tree looks like this (from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human), with the “Domain” category as the base:

Domain:	Eukaryota
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Mammalia
Order:	Primates
Suborder:	Haplorhini
Infraorder:	Simiiformes
Family:	Hominidae
Subfamily:	Homininae
Tribe:	Hominini
Genus:	Homo
Species:	H. sapiens

Languages and how they are related can also be shown in similar trees. Thus we have the Indo-European languages arranged on a family tree, which should tell us that all the Indo-European languages ultimately share a common ancestor, similar to, for example, a tree showing all primates—their lineages at some point back in time all derive from one species or population, the exact identity of which is often hypothesized. Then Indo-European spreads out, to “families” like Germanic languages and Slavic languages. Those in turn get more specific until you reach a “species” level, like “English.” Even deeper are categories like, say, “sub-species,” that in language might describe “Southern American English,” for example, among countless others. (Note: the “sub” in sub-species in no way denotes inferiority.)

Let me state that this little post is based on observations of Germanic languages for the most part, in particular English. This is simply because that’s the language I’m most familiar with!

There are other strange parallels between languages and living things. If you look at the sounds of speech, some sounds are more resilient through time than others. As a language changes through time, or evolves into dialects which themselves may become languages (Don’t ask how the distinction between dialect and language is made!), consonants of sounds like p, t, k (among others) tend not to change so quickly, or to change with predictable regularity (cf. Grimm’s Law). These are called “stop consonants” because they fully stop the flow of air coming out of a speaker’s mouth. To go further, there are “voiceless” stop consonants, because the vocal folds (voicebox) is not vibrating when the stops are pronounced. Compare these to “voiced” stops, where the vocal folds are vibrating to make the “hum” you feel when, well, humming. The voiced versions of p, t, k are the b, d, g sounds.

Then we have many other types of consonants that disrupt the airflow to a lesser extent, and can be voiced or voiceless. As a brief example, when you make the “s” sound, the tongue must alter the airflow, and obstruct it somewhat, but not at all like the complete obstruction of the “t” sound. You can say “s” for as long as you have air to exit your lungs. You can’t do that with stops like t. The s sound is called a fricative, and there are a bunch of them.

There are many more classifications of consonants, but let’s jump to vowels. Most vowels don’t obstruct the airflow much at all. And then there are the weird outliers like y and w (as in “yard” and “weird”). These are called glides, and exist somewhere between consonants and vowels. They have characteristics of both and are sometimes called semi-vowels.

So now let’s look at these sounds as though they were physical parts of a living being. Looking at it in this way shows a trend.

Vowels, over time, behave like soft, fleshy body parts. They don’t endure over time very well. Just like flesh decays, vowels vary greatly and can easily change during life; they are very protean.

Consonants on the other hand tend to endure. Voiceless consonants endure the most. Voiced consonants a little less so. Glides even less, etc., etc.

This trend can be seen to an extent, again, in comparing dialects and their parent language, and in closely related languages. So if you compare German and Yiddish, the main differences will likely be among the vowels, and less so among consonants. Even more so, this can be seen in, for example, the sounds of British vs American English, where the differences are mostly among vowels, not consonants.

Back to language as a biological entity: Consonants can be considered like hard body parts: they remain unchanged to different extents over great spans of time. Even within the consonants, there are some more likely to endure through a language’s life and further into its progeny of descendant languages/dialects. Voiceless stop consonants are like the teeth. They last the longest time and are most likely to “fossilize.” Voiced stops a little less so. And vowels decay and/or change easily, rarely ever fossilizing.

There are of course other forces working to change sounds in ways other than the above. For example, a voiceless consonant between vowels may tend to become voiced. Or, it may even morph into a fricative when between vowels (Compare Spanish).

There are a ton of exceptions to this theory. As in all of linguistics, it’s like trying to hit a moving target, or describe the shape of an ever-changing bubble. Still, it tickles the brain to think about these wonderful trends right under our noses.