No student needs to be told that grammar is complex. By changing word sequences and adding a range of auxiliary verbs and suffixes, we can turn a statement into a question, state whether an action has taken place or is soon to take place, and perform many other word tricks. All languages, even those of so-called ‘primitive’ tribes have clever grammatical components. The Cherokee pronoun system, for example, can distinguish between ‘you and I’ and ‘you, another person and I’. In English, all these meanings are summed up in the one, crude pronoun ‘we’. So the question is – who created grammar?

At first, it would appear that this question is impossible to answer.  Many historical linguists are able to trace modern complex languages back to earlier languages, but in order to answer the question of how complex languages are actually formed, the researcher needs to observe how languages are started from scratch. Amazingly, however, this is possible.

Some languages evolved due to the Atlantic slave trade. At that time, slaves from different ethnicities were forced to work together. Since they had no opportunity to learn each other’s languages, they developed a makeshift language called a pidgin. Pidgins are strings of words copied from the language of the landowner. They have little in the way of grammar and it is difficult for a listener to deduce when an event happened, and who did what to whom. Interestingly, all it takes to become a complex language is for a group of children to be exposed to it when they learn their mother tongue. Slave children did not simply copy the strings of words uttered by their elders, they adapted their words to create a new, expressive language.

Further evidence can be seen in studying sign languages for the deaf. The creation of such languages was documented quite recently in Nicaragua. Previously, all deaf people were isolated from each other, but in 1979 a new government introduced schools for the deaf. Although children were taught speech and lip reading in the classroom, in the playgrounds they began to invent their own sign system, using the gestures that they used at home. Each child used the signs differently, and there was no consistent grammar. However, children who joined the school later developed a quite different sign language. Although it was based on the signs of the older children, the younger children’s language was more fluid and compact, and it utilized a large range of grammatical devices to clarify meaning.