Tower of Babel

The tower of Babel story is a myth, a just-so story. It has the scientific accuracy of attributing lightning to the anger of gods and disease to evil humours. It is based on earlier Babylonian myths. I do not see the relevance of this. Language diversification occurs among populations, not small groups, unless those groups become isolated from the larger groups. One of the best examples of a profession speaking a different language would be Catholic priests, who are all expected to speak Latin. There has been no linguistic speciation attributed to this. The prehistoric California region is a classic example of linguistic differentiation. At contact, between 80 and 90 different languages were spoken within what is now California. These belonged to as many as 20 major language families, with at least seven of those language families entirely unrelated to one another (see Golla 2011).Time depths exceed 12,000 years based on archaeological data (and there is no evidence of a large-scale flood within that time).What we can take from this is that the Babel story is a myth and does not account for the evidence provided by either linguistics or archaeology. There is no reason other than religious belief to take it seriously.

Languages and dialects develop easily and naturally given isolation of one group from another.Example: The US before television had distinctive regional dialects of English, although the people had relatively similar origins only a few hundred (at the most) years earlier.Example: California Indians spoke over 300 dialects of approximately one hundred distinct languages. These developed in (at the most) 14,000 years. Most probably developed in half that time, or less.