The question of the origin of language, after having been virtually obscured for a century, has come back to the fore. A growing number of researchers now think of this multidisciplinary issue using concepts developed by the complexity sciences. The robots could teach us a lot about speech.

The hypothesis is that human  languages are complex adaptive systems, which are the self-organized result of the dynamic and collective interaction of individuals, analogous, for example, to the sophisticated architecture of termite nests. which is the self-organized result of the interaction between the termites, without any of them having a plan of the global structure.

However, complex adaptive systems are very difficult to understand, and one of the crucial tools for us to develop our intuition about them is the construction of artificial systems, especially those of robots.

This file proposes an immersion in the heart of the problems related to the language and its origins, to better discern the technical constraints and the stakes of the artificial systems in the comprehension of the language.