Languages Grew from a Seed in Africa

I saw a link to an article today on facebook about all languages being born from a single one.

Languages Grew from a Seed in Africa, a Study Says
By Nicholas Wade
New York Times, April 14, 2011

The premise of the article is to summarize the research done by Quentin D. Atkinson. His research suggests that, based on the phonemic patterns across the world, all languages evolved from one that started in Africa some 50,000 - 100,000 years ago, which coincides pretty well with the theory that all humans evolved in Africa around that time as well.

To help clarify things a bit, the definition of phoneme, courtesy of one of my favorite books (rather, the computer mac version of it), the OED:

phoneme |ˈfōnēm|noun Phoneticsany of the perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another, for example p, b, d, and t in the English words pad, pat, bad, and bat. Compare with allophone .DERIVATIVESphonemic |fəˈnēmik; fō-| |foʊˈnimɪk| |fəˈnimɪk| |-ˈniːmɪk|adjectivephonemics |fəˈnēmiks; fō-| |-ˈniːmɪks| nounORIGIN late 19th cent.: from French phonème, from Greek phōnēma ‘sound, speech,’ from phōnein ‘speak.’

allophone |ˈaləˌfōn|noun Linguisticsany of the speech sounds that represent a single phoneme, such as the aspirated k in kit and the unaspirated k in skit, which are allophones of the phoneme k.DERIVATIVESallophonic |ˌaləˈfänik| |ˈøləˈfɑnɪk| |aləˈfɒnɪk| adjectiveORIGIN 1930s: from allo- [other, different] + phoneme .

As I taught my kids (students) words and word parts this past year, they started consistently pestering me for definitions and origins for many of the words that we came across. I was happy to tell them, but I only wished that I had my handy dandy OED mac application to use and project up on the wall of the classroom to always give them an accurate and satisfactory answer.

Basically, his examination of languages shows that they have less phonemes the further away from Africa on the human migration route that they are. So African languages have the most (more than 100), English has about 45, and Hawaiian has only 13. This parallels other research that shows a similar pattern of less genetic diversity in humans the further they are from Africa.