Monogenesis (linguistics)

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In linguistics, monogenesis refers to the doctrine that all spoken human languages are descended from a single ancestral language spoken many thousands of years ago in the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age.

The first serious scientific attempt to establish the reality of monogenesis appears to have been that of Alfredo Trombetti, an accomplished Italian linguist, in his book L'Unità d'origine del linguaggio, published in 1905 (cf. Ruhlen 1994).

Two prominent living advocates of monogenesis are Merritt Ruhlen and John Bengtson.

Monogenesis was dismissed by many linguists in the late nineteenth century. It is scarcely more popular today. It is probably fair to say that most historical linguists at the present time (2008) do not view monogenesis as a respectable theory or indeed as of much if any interest.^{[citation needed]}

On the other hand, from the point of view of many scientists in other fields, such as Richard Klein in paleoanthropology (see glottogony), the ability to produce complex speech only developed some 50,000 years ago (with the appearance of modern man or Cro-Magnon man). Thus, if all recent human populations on earth (including, for example, Australians, appearing 40-50,000 years before present) stem from a single out-of-Africa migration, linguistic monogenesis becomes a conceivable hypothesis.

The difficulty lies in the time depth, which is far beyond what linguists can trace back today (e.g. 6-8,000 years in the case of Indo-European and 15,000 years in the case of Nostratic). Some linguists (e.g. Trombetti and, more recently, Ruhlen 1994) claim that this difficulty can be overcome. Methods proposed include comparison of more languages and pyramiding reconstructed proto-languages on top of each other to reach their common source.