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WE DON'T ASK OURSELVES where languages come from because they just seem to be there: French in France, English in England, Chinese in China, Japanese in Japan, and so forth. Yet if we go back only a few thousand years, none of these languages were spoken in their respective countries and indeed none of these languages existed anywhere in the world. Where did they all come from?

RealAudio Linguist Merritt Ruhlen, author of The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue, details the factors that determine the development and evolution of regional dialects .

 
     
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