Here ' s a very basic idea of how language develops the way I can understand it . There was actually a really interesting video on a real time language formation . In the video , the testers had pictures of made up fruit with random made up words associated with them . They would show a participant a picture of , say , violet square banana looking things with the word ' smorlap ' and then do the same with other fruits . Then they ' d test them by showing each fruit and have them write down the word that had gone with it . IIRC they told them the test was to study memory , and all it was , was a memory test . In reality , they would take whatever guesses the first participant had and those associations would be what they ' d show the second participant . Then whatever 2 guessed would be what was shown to 3 , and so on . As they went on , and this took place in a day or something , patterns started to emerge . Like a certain prefix for the color , suffix for the shape , and the core for the size or something . As this went on , this pattern held and strengthened until they remained unchanged participant to participant . If someone could find this video , I would be grateful . Basically , language develops by a bunch of people agreeing that a certain mouth sound or drawn shape represents a specific thing . And when they do that , that ' s how they can communicate . I could go deeper into the growth of the word chair I want to say it ' s something French . There ' s something Latiny about it but basically it changed as the languages did . New words are needed when new thing come about , or a word is structured and polished to be more specific , or broken off into other words to describe different things . Two languages collide and one language has a word for something the other does not , so the other acquires it . Or two languages meld so as to be understood by all parties , etc . Looked it up , was right . Our version is from French , and before that it was from Latin ' cathedra ' which means seat and us also where cathedral came from .