Likely area of language origin, in white, based on:
A) phonemes found in individual languages and
B) phoneme diversity averaged across language families

What’s the News: Southern Africa may be the birthplace of human language, according a new study published yesterday in Science. The study further suggests that language may have arisen only once, with one ancestral language giving rise to all modern tongues, an idea linguists have long debated. This finding parallels the human migrations out of Africa supported by genetic and fossil evidence.

How the Heck:

The study’s author, evolutionary psychologist Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, looked at 504 modern languages from around the world.
He then tallied the phonemes—the distinct sounds of consonants, vowels and tones—that make up each language. Languages vary widely in how many phonemes they have: Some of the Khoisan languages in Africa (widely known for their click sounds) have more than a hundred phonemes, while languages spoken in many Pacific islands have far ...