Half the world’s 6,000 languages could disappear within the next two decades.

This dire prediction was made by linguist Mike Crawhall, Cape Town University academic and programme manager for the South African San Institute. Most of the languages under threat are those of hunter gatherer communities, many of which are located in Africa. One of the most threatened is Nju, an indigenous South African language of which there are only nine known speakers.

In his paper, Tracing Prehistorical Langauges, Crawhall pointed to a remarkable relationship between genetics and language. “If you had to map the different genetic groupings in the world and overlap that with a map of the main language groupings, you’d find that they would almost correlate” he told the Session on Genes and Prehistory.

In the same way that Africa has the oldest and most diverse genetic patterns, so the continent has the greatest language complexity. One tenth of the world population lives in Africa, yet one third of the world’s languages are spoken here.

Unsurprisingly, one of the oldest languages in the world therefore, is believed to be the click language associated with the San, who also have the world’s oldest genes. Genetic studies have complemented linguistic research in this field. Previously it was believed that the San of southern Africa and the Hadzebe of north western Tanzania were closely related because they shared the same click sounds in the language. However, genetically the San and the Hadzebe are poles apart, almost more genetically distant than the San and the indigenous people of North America.

This genetic distance between these two groups throws up a number of interesting implications. Firstly, it would suggest that the Hadzebe were probably one of the original offshoots off San ancestry, genetically parting ways about 80,000 years ago. Secondly, since they shared the linguistic rootstock, it means that basic click language is probably the world’s oldest language dating back well over 100,000 years.

Another interesting point about the click language is that in physical body terms, unlike any other language, it does not rely on the voice box because it is primarily a construct of the tongue and the palate. Theoretically speaking, the click language could therefore predate modern human morphology.

Crawhall said that language was a rich repository of prehistory that had often been overlooked by archaeologists. He called for a closer working relationship between geneticists, archaeologists and linguists in order to develop a deeper understanding of the evolutionary patterns of modern humans. Closer collaboration may also mean that even linguistic researchers cannot prevent the languages of hunter-gatherers from fading into extinction, at least they can try and extricate some scientific value from them before they disappear altogether.