Speech describes the movement of the tongue and the use of teeth and lips to form sounds. Stringed together, these words in turn form sentences and enable more vocal communication. Although many animals, especially mammals, communicate with each other with sounds, this is not comparable to human speech.

Language is always part of speaking. Everyone has at least one mother tongue and, depending on their talent, is able to learn other languages. Language learning works best with children, the disposition to speak and the corresponding developments already happen in the womb. The child can hear the speech sounds of the parents and develops an affinity for their languages ​​- it learns them particularly easily in childhood.

The ability to speak gave humans a great advantage in their evolutionary development, as they were able to communicate in a much more detailed and unequivocal manner than natural predators or prey.

function & task

Speech is at the core of human communication. Although other, more primitive elements also play a role, as is known from the animal kingdom, an important part, however, is only about speech. 

While gestures , facial expressions and body language are also very important depending on the situation, details are communicated through speaking. Since humans have a complex psyche in addition to their ability to speak, they can often only or mainly express it through speaking.

Important components of daily coexistence can also only be conveyed through speaking: requests for help, distribution of tasks and especially the topics of modern civilization cannot be conveyed through body language and the like alone.

In addition to the ability to communicate oneself, language fulfills important functions in terms of human interaction. It used to play a pivotal role in communal hunting, allowing for more collaborative hunting and collusion that their prey was unable to make. For the social structure, speaking fulfills a similarly important task as in our modern communication.

Speaking in one’s own language or one’s own dialect served as a means of demarcation from other communities, and later from other municipalities and countries. Even today you can observe in rural regions that a completely different-sounding dialect is spoken in one village than in the neighboring town. This type of demarcation through speaking was not always, but often essential for the development of today’s countries.

On the other hand, learning a foreign language makes it possible to communicate with other cultures and, in times of globalization, to open up the whole world to the individual and to network cultures with one another. So speaking can be an excluding, but also an inclusive element of the highly developed human culture.

Speaking is a major milestone in a child’s development. While still in the womb, the child hears the language and voice of its parents and will be able to recognize both later. Early after birth, the parents’ understanding of the mother tongue in which they speak to their child is consolidated. The first syllables and words that a child speaks come from the mother tongue and are an imitation of the speech of the parents. However, it takes years before a child can formulate complete sentences.

Diseases & Ailments

The first irregularities in speech are expressed in children. These can learn words incorrectly, which often happens when they have been spoken to in baby talk and are then “transformed”. Some children are developmentally disabled in that they cannot speak like children of the same age. 

Rarely do they not speak at all until a comparatively old age. A well-known case was Albert Einstein, whose talent for languages ​​turned out to be above average. Nevertheless, speech disorders in children are to be taken seriously and must be monitored. In most cases, the speech therapist can treat them well.

Known speech disorders are lisp or stuttering . Here, sounds are not formulated correctly or the psyche prevents the human language ability from developing as it should. These speech disorders occur for the first time in childhood and can remain problematic for life, sometimes despite treatment by speech therapists and psychologists – especially people who stutter often have a long way to go to normalize their ability to speak.

Injuries to body parts that are relevant to speaking or congenital diseases and malpositions of these body parts lead to further speech disorders up to the complete inability to speak. Sometimes this also affects the sense of hearing , and those affected are then deaf and dumb.

A particularly complicated case is locked-in syndrome , in which not only the ability to speak has been lost, but all form of outward communication. Those affected, who are often the victims of serious accidents, have hardly any opportunities to make themselves understood.