Additionally, Rousseau's essay is an important text for semiotics and modern critical theory, as it plays a very important role in Jacques Derrida's book Of Grammatology. Rousseau supplements his discussion of the origin of languages with theories about the origins of music, melody and harmony, and the relationship of languages to government.

This book was written by Frederic William Farrar, an Anglican cleric, classics scholar, and a comparative philologist, who applied Charles Darwin's ideas of branching descent to the relationships between languages, despite disagreeing with Darwin's idea as applied to evolutionary biology. Readers can find Darwinian influence in this book as Farrar lays down the idea of how language evolved throughout the ages.

How human language evolved from the need for social communication The origins of human language remain hotly debated. Despite growing appreciation of cognitive and neural continuity between humans and other animals, an evolutionary account of human language—in its modern form—remains as elusive as ever. The Social Origins of Language provides a novel perspective on this question and charts a new path toward its resolution. In the lead essay, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney draw on their decades-long pioneering research on monkeys and baboons in the wild to show how primates use vocalizations to modulate social dynamics. They argue that key elements of human language emerged from the need to decipher and encode complex social interactions. In other words, social communication is the biological foundation upon which evolution built more complex language. Seyfarth and Cheney’s argument serves as a jumping-off point for responses by John McWhorter, Ljiljana Progovac, Jennifer E. Arnold, Benjamin Wilson, Christopher I. Petkov and Peter Godfrey-Smith, each of whom draw on their respective expertise in linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. Michael Platt provides an introduction, Seyfarth and Cheney a concluding essay. Ultimately, The Social Origins of Language offers thought-provoking viewpoints on how human language evolved.

"Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages is a masterful work of comparative linguistics that opened up new avenues of inquiry in the field." - Noam Chomsky A new 2023 translation into English from the original manuscripts of Rousseau's classic and influential L'Essai sur l'origine des langues (Essay on the Origin of Languages).

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.