How did the first words originate?

If you slide your tongue along your teeth all the way back, you’ll find your molars.

“Jeksel” – the Norwegian word for molar – “is a strange word,” my colleague said.

“Yes,” I agreed. "Let's find out where it comes from.”

According to the Norwegian dictionary, jeksel derives from the Old Norse word jaxl. And that's where the explanation ends.

But what kind of word is jaxl? And how did words emerge, way back in the beginning?

Probably started as sounds

“In short – we don't know,” says Sverre Stausland. He is a professor of linguistics at the University of Oslo.

“The first words and languages haven’t left any traces,” says Jan Terje Faarlund, also a linguistics professor at the University of Oslo.

Part of the reason is that words arose so long ago – well before humans learned to write and longer still before any audio recorders were available. The latest research suggests that verbal languages may have arisen 135,000 years ago.

Ugh! Ouch! Oh!

Our human species, Homo sapiens, has existed for around 300,000 years. At least that is what we have solid evidence for to date. Some researchers believe that we may yet find even older skulls and skeletal remains of our species.

But regardless, we might have lived without words for more than half of our time as Homo sapiens. That seems almost impossible – but remember that no other species besides ours uses words today either. Nor do dogs or elephants speak with words.

“It could be that we used body language,” says Faarlund.

Like pointing at things, hugging to show love, or touching our stomachs when we were

 hungry.

“Early humans probably made sounds to express emotions like joy, fear and pain. And then they probably had other sounds to warn of danger, call to each other and so on.

Just think of sounds like ugh, ouch, or oh.

“Are they really ‘words’ as such?” asks Stausland.

From sounds to words

Researchers believe that the first proper words most likely originated from imitation.

“People would try to imitate the sound that some animal or thing made,” says Faarlund.

An example is the ancient Egyptian and Chinese word for cat – “mao,” which is similar to the “meow” sound that cats make.

“How the rest of our words originated is a big mystery,” says Faarlund.

And the same applies to the word for the tooth at the back of the mouth. Jeksel remains a mystery.

“We don’t know where the word comes from,” Stausland says.

Words have both a function and a history, but basically they often consist of random sounds.

“Words are really just sounds that allow us to distinguish them from each other,” says Stausland.

Today, we often use words we already have in our vocabulary to create new ones. Just think of ‘snowboard’ or ‘cellphone’, for example, or the word Lego which is made up of the Danish words leg godt, meaning ‘play well’.

"Mamama, papapa"

So we don't know what the very first word is. But researchers have tried to find some of the oldest words that still exist. They include "mama" and "papa".

“These words are found across many languages in the world,” says Stausland. “It's easy to understand why. Small babies make their first sounds with their lips,” he says.

Those sounds correspond to the letters m, p and b, and the vowel a. That's why the first sounds are often "mamama" and "papapa".

“When the mother or father is nearby, they think the child is using a word about them. But these are actually just the simplest sounds a baby can make,” says Stausland.

Language on the move

Our species originated in Africa, and gradually humans spread across the globe. We brought with us the ability to learn languages, and today we have between 6,000 and 7,500 different languages, according to SNL.no.

People with different languages met long before there were schools, language books or Google Translate. For example, the Vikings travelled a lot. How did they manage to talk to people? You can read more about that here.

Perhaps people in the future will also wonder about what words and languages people used before them. This research will continue to be a difficult task, because languages come and go.

UNESCO believes that 1,500 of today's languages are at risk of disappearing. You can read more about that here.

References:

First traces of language: Miyagawa et al. (2025). Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago. Frontiers in Psychology, 16. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1503900

First Homo sapiens discovery: Hublin, J.-J. etc. (2017). New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens. Nature, 546, 289–292. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature22336

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Translated by Ingrid P. Nuse

Read the Norwegian version of this article at forskning.no

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