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Why can no living language be identified as the original language of humanity?

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Three women sit together outdoors, smiling and laughing as they talk, with trees softly blurred in the background. — Language Spoken language is just one type of language, which has been defined in many different ways across history.

It is not possible to identify a single living language as the original language of humanity because all languages are in a state of constant, cumulative change. Through the process of linguistic change, languages evolve as they are transmitted between generations, eventually leading to dialectal differentiation and the emergence of distinct languages.1

While linguists use historical linguistics to reconstruct "parent" or "proto-" languages—such as Proto-Indo-European—these represent only the farthest points to which available evidence allows us to trace language history. These reconstructed languages are relatively recent in the context of human history and possess no special status as the "original" language of humankind.1

Furthermore, the lack of sufficient written records spanning the vast duration of human existence makes it impossible to trace the origins of language back to a single source. While some hypotheses, such as monogenesis, suggest a single origin, science currently lacks the techniques and data to confirm or refute whether all languages descended from one original tongue or emerged independently.1