High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The origin of language is the emergence of language in the human species. This is a highly controversial topic. Empirical evidence is so limited that many regard it as unsuitable for serious scholars. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris went so far as to ban debates on the subject. That prohibition remained influential across much of the western world until late in the twentieth century. Today, there are numerous hypotheses about how, why, when and where language might first have emerged — almost as many hypotheses as there are researchers in the field. To an outsider, it might seem that there is hardly more agreement today than there was a hundred years ago, when Charles Darwin`s theory of evolution by natural selection provoked a rash of armchair speculations on the topic. Since the early 1990s, however, a growing number of professional linguists, archaeologists, psychologists, anthropologists and others have attempted to address with new methods what they are beginning to consider `the hardest problem in science`.