Mesopotamia: The Tower of Babel

Babel or Babylon was an ancient city in Mesopotamia, located in present-day Iraq. According to the Bible, it owes its name to a Hebrew root which means “to stammer”, “to confuse”.

After the Flood, the men, who then all spoke the same language, arrived in the land of Shinar and settled there. They built a city and began building a tower, the top of which had to touch the sky to make a name for themselves.

God, who finds them too pretentious, wants to punish them and decides to intervene to stop this construction: he confuses their language and scatters them all over the surface of the Earth. The construction stops, the men no longer understand each other because they now speak different languages.

The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel — because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

The Bible, Genesis, XI, 1-9, New Internationam Version

The city is then called Babel.

It is since that day that so many different languages have been spoken on Earth.

Aztec Myth

Originally humanity was united, lived in harmony and spoke only one language. But one day a flood came and left only two survivors, Coxcox and Xochiquétzal, who had found refuge on a boat. They fail at the top of the mountain

Colhuacan and will have several children. Unfortunately, these children are born dumb and remain dumb until a dove gives them the gift of speech. They will then each have a different language.

African myth

All people live in harmony and speak the same language from one village to another. But one day a terrible famine struck their beautiful tranquility and the madness that followed spread from village to village…

Once the famine was finally over, the men realized that they no longer understood each other: they began to speak different languages in each village!

Aboriginal Myth

It begins with the story of Wurruri, an unpleasant old woman who takes a wicked pleasure in dispersing the fires made by men to warm herself at night, using her big stick. At the death of the latter, the men of each tribe, visibly happy with her disappearance, came to eat a piece of her body. The first tribe eats the flesh of Wurruri, the second eats the intestines, the third takes the remains. But at the end of this feast, each tribe begins to speak a different language… Could it be Wurruri’s revenge?

Chinese myth

“He then took seven suns and seven moons and, after a few days, all the men were dead. But the god saw that nothing remained but heat waves and the deserts. He then took six suns and six moons and planted a pumpkin seed. Forty-nine days later, the pumpkin was ripe, and Pangu opened it. A boy and a girl came out of it. Pangu looked everywhere for other people, but in vain: there was only one brother and one sister, “So he asked them to marry, which they refused – were they not brother and sister? He then asked them to do three very difficult things and said to them: “If you succeed, heaven will have shown you that it wants your union. “They succeeded, married and had three children, who learned very quickly and very well all that was shown to them, except speech. The parents were very worried.

Pangu came back. He asked the father to go get a bamboo and cut it into three pieces. He asked the mother to make a big fire in the house. Then he brought the children. He threw a piece of bamboo into the fire, and when it burst one of the children shouted Ma ya. He threw the second piece, which in turn burst, and a second child shouted A jian zhi zhe zhe. In the third track, the third child shouted Ah la ye. And these three cries became the languages of the three neighbouring peoples, the Han, the Li and the Lisu. »

Il était une fois 7000 langues

Bambara Myth (Mali)

One of the myths simply tells that Adam choked on his apple piece, and “spat out the pieces by making various noises that became the languages of the world. »

Il était une fois 7000 langues

Australian myth

Legend has it that the first inhabitant of Australia was a woman named Warramurunguji. Once on the island, she would have given each of her many children a piece of land and a different language.

« I am putting you here, this is the language you should talk! This is your language! » she would say, in the Iwaidja version of the story, naming a different language for each group and moving on.
Nicholas Evans, Dying words: endangered languages and what they have to tell us, 2011