The Case Against the World’s First Language

A few linguists have claimed to reconstruct words from the world’s first language, but this work is extremely controversial. For one, language change is so thorough that it is hard to imagine why any words would have stayed identifiable in any language after as long as 150,000 years. Moreover, languages tend to have words in common with similar sounds and meanings just by chance. There are also problems with the “Proto-World” hypothesis in terms of reconstruction of language families’ proto-words.