The nicest hunk I know is pure muscle, dressed to perfect taste. A natural gymnast, but audience shy. Lives dangerously in entente with formidable enemies. Multitasks indefatigably, 24x7. Deeply sensitive, untouched by the pettiness of caste, creed, nationality, gender fluid, intelligent to a fault, and above all, brilliantly articulate.

Can’t wait to be introduced?

Stroll up to the nearest mirror and—Hello, Tongue!

You might be a pet-friendly human, and quickly reel in your tongue abashed by the flatter, bigger, flagrantly pink one your dog declares. Cat person, perhaps? That rose petal tongue makes ours look as gross as an old tyre. I am impressed by the spring-loaded ballistics of a chameleon’s tongue—what a grand way to land breakfast when you are late for work. Frogs’ tongues are smarter still, with the forever stickiness of their drool. The hummingbird whirrs up nectar with a corrugated straw for tongue.

Compared to these wonders, the human edition is a poor show. A roly-poly shape-shifting wad incapable of trapping prey or even lapping up breakfast without someone to hold the bowl.

The human tongue became the suave hunk it is when we turned paws into hands. With opposable thumbs and tool-making fingers, we could now pincer a dinky chunk of dinner, airlift it to our newly flattened faces, and post it directly on the invisible tongue. Table manners 101.

Two million years later, it still is an enviable skill. But back then, it liberated the tongue from drudgery, intra- and extra-oral. Suddenly there was more to life than mastication and the tongue went into training. Eventually, its acrobatics paid off. The tongue pole-vaulted our species from artisanal hominid to argumentative sapient.

A total body makeover

Other tongues are located firmly in the mouth. Ours sink a bit deeper to obtain leverage from the back of the hyoid, the little bone swung across the throat. This allows the tongue to arch up against the palate, to squirm around the teeth, bob back and forth against the lips. The air trapped in these workouts is released in the sequence of rude noises we recognise as speech.

The thrilling moment when we began to speak is not yet dependably recorded. We only know that evolution had been preparing it for several millennia. We had long been bipedal, but now we needed to be nimble too. Dinner zoomed past and disappeared round the bend as we lumbered, panting after it on short fat legs. A total body makeover was overdue.

This newly aerodynamic Homo had long slender arms and legs, plus a delicate jawline, courtesy of our flashy new culinary skills. Around this time the larynx repositioned itself, moved out of the cramped back of the mouth, down to the tony neck, to make space for what we now call the vocal apparatus.

Human babies lack this because the larynx is still at the back of the oral cavity. But by the time they begin to speak, the larynx has plunged down the neck. It is hazardous change—it makes us prone to choking. It is a terrible price to pay—why would evolution want to risk that? What was the pressure that forced this change?

We were brain ready. We know today that the entire brain is enmeshed in the speech and language network.

Why did we need speech, anyway? Why distress the tongue with a zillion transformations per minute to produce the concatenation of sounds that make up language?

The oldest Homo sapiens fossils originated from two hominin groups in Africa. These groups intermingled 300,000 years ago—as a result their contributions can be read in our genes, no matter where we belong. Till 150,000 years ago, this ancient population was stable and isolated in Africa.

We split from this African origin 135,000 years ago, and, 35,000 years later walked out of Africa to people the world.

Were we talking by then? Did the diaspora carry a backpack of common sounds? We don’t know if there was any such ur-language. But think of the need if you’re setting out on a long hike with family and friends. Gestures, no matter how complex, can hardly convey the urgencies of a shared experience.

Finding language

So the tongue spoke sounds that could be sorted into meaning. And the whiplash of this small chunk of muscle became language. The tongue spoke a life and in naming the world, named us as human.

Anthropologists demand much more evidence before they declare us truly human: shiny trinkets, fripperies of couture, mortuary chic, art galleries. All this would take several millennia more to achieve. Think nurture—culture, civilisation, art, drama, poetry, literature, none of that would have been possible without the mothering tongue.

By the time we had settled all over the planet, the tongue was voluble in any number of languages. Er… how many?

At present we have around 7,000, though some are disappearing fast.

What happened when one tongue encountered another? Did thought leap between them or fall back, defeated?

When did the mothering tongue become weaponised for othering, as it is today? Language can be used to communicate or to isolate, to widen or to constrict, to absorb or to restrict. Every living language embodies human memory. Our encounters with other languages have enriched us with souvenir words, phrases, idioms. Diving into a word is the most exciting form of travel, you can wander its maze footloose and fancy free.

The “ethnic cleansing” of a language, clearing it of all its “alien elements” will probably leave us with a “pure” vocabulary of hominid grunts.

Which is it to be? Mother tongue or mothering tongue that adopts, fosters, nurtures and gives with equal generosity?

Take your pick. The future of the species hangs upon the tongue.

Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed are surgeons who write together as Kalpish Ratna. Their book Bahadur was published in 2023.

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