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Why can’t linguists determine whether all human languages came from one original language?

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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.

Linguists cannot definitively determine whether all human languages originated from a single source because the historical record is insufficient to reach back to the origins of human speech.1

The primary challenge is the lack of data. While historical linguistics can successfully group languages into families by comparing word forms and meanings, these methods are limited by the availability of written records. Most written history covers only a tiny fraction of the time humans have used language, and for much of the world, no such records exist. Unlike geological prehistory, there are no "linguistic fossils" that allow researchers to reconstruct language development beyond a few thousand years BCE.1

Furthermore, the comparative method itself has been criticized for relying on a "family tree" model that assumes languages only diverge over time. In reality, languages also undergo convergence through contact and borrowing, which complicates efforts to trace clear, singular lineages. Consequently, while hypotheses like monogenesis remain a subject of interest, they currently remain beyond the reach of scientific proof.21