What is Discontinuity Theory?

Modern theories sit in one of two camps; Continuity or Discontinuity. Continuity theories of language evolution hold that it must have developed gradually, starting among the earliest ancestors of humans, with different features developing at different stages until people's speech resembled what we have today. Discontinuity theory states that our language using ability is not received from our predecessors-the ape-as the Darwinian concept of evolution states. Instead, man’s ability to use language is unique as he is the result of mutation and not evolution.

The approach of discontinuity suggests that there is nothing even remotely similar to compare human language to, it is likely to have appeared suddenly within mankind’s history. This may have been as a result of a genetic mutation within one individual, which was passed on through their ancestors and eventually became a dominant ability. There is a kind of language device in human beings that can help him learn any language, provided, he is exposed to the right environment. Noam Chomsky favors this idea greatly. The theory supports heredity or ones innate biological linguistic potentials in language learning. It emphasizes that language is a distinctly human and species specific ability.