What's your language?

One would not question the fact that the main difference between us humans and the rest of the species on earth is the power of speech - being able to communicate. Empowered by "language",  developed through complex thinking processes and an evolved larynx, we, the humans, have the biggest advantage that helped us move beyond hunting and gathering food to taking flights to the sun and moon.

It has been a very uniform evolution pattern for humans across the world, wherever people stayed on the planet. Starting from becoming two legged from four-legged, cultivation, eating habits, hunting, running, eating with hands and not legs ;-) etc.. But why do different people on Earth speak different languages? One wonders why there are so many languages, some of them spoken by millions of people, while some, just by a few hundreds. And the scripts of these vary a great deal too. Left to right, right to left, top to bottom etc, evoking much interest in their purpose and origin.

Purpose, yes, there definitely is. Speech is definitely the fastest way of communicating. Think about sign language, or eye-language, or any other means of communication, spoken one stands out as the fastest and even helps people multi-task. You could do other things while speaking, except when you are eating, that is. :) And when the spoken one had its limitations, distance being one of them, people came up with scripts, to carry the language from one place to another (think letters!)

Origin is what confuses me. If people all over the world eat pretty much the same stuff, walk and run alike, think almost alike, how come they came up with different languages? Is language not something that is built into the human gene? Of course, the very fact that any person can learn any language of the world itself means that language is not genetic but a purely learned thing.  
              Probably each group that stayed together developed their own language, to be understood within their circles. They might have been unaware of other people on a different continent doing the exact same thing. If only they knew, all of us would have had just one language. :)

Lack of communication between early humans, thus, seems to be the reason for so many languages coming up in the first place and now, that very fact that these languages are so different is stopping us from communicating with each other :) Guess, we have come full circle on this one.

 Could we have done better if there was some built-in language into our human genes? Just like we have two eyes, two ears, if all us spoke the same language, we would have saved much time in learning foreign languages and many a barriers would have come down. Right?

Speaking of languages.. does anybody know what the newest language is?

Did I hear somebody say Java........!!!  :)