The Big Bang of language: scientific analogies point to the primordial origins of Babel. From the article: 

Language is a curious mix of order and disorder…. All 7,000 of the world’s languages are characterized by elegant rules, quasi regularities and strange inconsistencies.

So which came first, the order or the disorder? Answering this question turns out to be crucial to understanding how language works.

For more than a half-century, the language sciences have proceeded from the theory that order came first. Noam Chomsky, the founder of modern linguistics, proposed in the 1980s that each child is born with a genetic blueprint (a “universal grammar”) that captures deep patterns common to all languages. Similarly, the psycholinguist Steven Pinker writes of an inborn “language instinct” that captures the rules of language.

An alternative possibility is gaining ground, however—one that holds that language starts from disorderly, ad hoc, communicative signals. Order—in the form of regular verb endings, grammar rules and much more—emerges slowly, spontaneously and always incompletely, over countless interactions and across many generations.

The idea of a spontaneous order emerging from chaos may sound implausible. But in nature it is ubiquitous, from the self-organization of snowflakes and flocks of birds to the hexagonal basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. The chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, and later the economist Friedrich Hayek, pointed to spontaneous order in human affairs by stressing that markets produce an orderly system of prices and production from the chaos of the marketplace….

Language is always in flux. Those who argue, with Pinker and Chomsky, that order came before disorder relegate this flux to marginal importance by presuming that a genetic blueprint keeps language within tight bounds. But if we understand order as spontaneous, change becomes the fundamental fact of language. Our continual reinvention and reworking of human language, conversation by conversation, is the source of its incredible richness, with all of its wondrous patterns and quirks.

For other posts on language, see here.