The Forbidden Experiment: Feral Children

What is our default setting? If you took a human child and raised them in a world without words, what language would they speak? Would they revert to some ancient, primal tongue—the original language of humanity, the Ur-Sprache? This question, a tantalizing blend of linguistic curiosity and philosophical wonder, has haunted thinkers for millennia. And while modern ethics rightly forbid such an inquiry, history is littered with dark tales of rulers who allegedly dared to conduct this “forbidden experiment.”

These stories, a mix of historical record and cautionary legend, offer a fascinating glimpse not into a natural language, but into our evolving understanding of what language truly is.

The Pharaoh and the Phrygian Word

Our journey begins in the 7th century BCE with the Greek historian Herodotus. In his Histories, he recounts the story of Psamtik I, an Egyptian pharaoh obsessed with proving the antiquity of his own people. To discover which race was the world’s oldest, he devised an experiment.

Psamtik took two newborn infants from a common family and handed them to a shepherd. His instructions were absolute: the children were to be raised in an isolated hut, and no one was ever to utter a single word in their presence. The pharaoh wanted to see what word they would naturally speak first, believing it would be a word from the original language of humankind.

The shepherd fed and cared for them, but remained silent. One day, after two years, the children ran to him, arms outstretched, repeatedly crying “Bekos!”

The pharaoh’s inquiry into the word’s origin led him to discover that “bekos” was the Phrygian word for bread. Humbled, Psamtik I concluded that the Phrygians, an ancient Anatolian people, were an older race than the Egyptians.

From a modern linguistic standpoint, this story is almost certainly apocryphal. The more likely explanation? The children were raised alongside goats. The sound “bekos” is plausibly an infantile imitation of a goat’s bleating—a piece of onomatopoeic babbling, not a spontaneously generated Phrygian noun. The story reveals less about language origins and more about the desire to find a simple, divine-like answer, and the tendency tendência to find patterns where none exist.

Frederick II and the Sound of Silence

Nearly two millennia later, a more scientifically-minded but far crueler version of the experiment was said to have been conducted by Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor of the 13th century. A man of immense curiosity, Frederick was interested in a range of scientific questions. According to the chronicler Salimbene de Adam, he wanted to discover what language children would speak if they never heard a human voice.

He had his sights set on several candidates: Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic, or the language of their biological parents. Salimbene writes:

“He bade foster-mothers and nurses to suckle the children, to bathe and wash them, but in no way to prattle or speak with them… But he laboured in vain, because the children all died. For they could not live without the petting and the joyful faces and loving words of their foster-mothers.”

Whether this experiment truly happened is debated by historians. But the alleged outcome marks a critical shift in understanding. Unlike Psamtik’s neat (and fictional) conclusion, Frederick’s experiment ends in tragedy. The chilling moral isn’t about which language is oldest, but that language—and the interaction that accompanies it—is fundamental to human survival. The children didn’t just miss out on words; they were deprived of the cooing, the praise, the smiles, and the entire ecosystem of social bonding that is expressed through and alongside language. They died from a lack of connection.

The Critical Period: Lessons from “Feral Children”

The forbidden experiment, tragically, has not been confined to the ambitions of ancient rulers. In modern times, cases of severe child abuse and neglect have created unintentional, real-life versions of this isolation. These “feral children” have provided linguists with their most profound, and heart-wrenching, insights into language acquisition.

The most famous case is that of “Genie”, a girl discovered in California in 1970. For over 13 years, she had been kept in extreme isolation, often strapped to a potty chair in a silent room. When found, she was non-verbal, save for a few meaningless noises. Genie became a focal point for researchers. Could a person learn language after childhood? Was there a point of no return?

Her case became a defining study for the Critical Period Hypothesis. This theory posits that there is a biological window, from early infancy to around puberty, during which the human brain is uniquely primed to acquire language. If a child is not exposed to language during this period, their ability to ever achieve full linguistic fluency is severely and permanently compromised.

And so it was with Genie. Despite years of dedicated therapy, she was able to learn a large vocabulary but never mastered grammar. She could string words together—”Applesauce buy store”—but she could not form syntactically complex sentences, ask questions, or use language in the fluid, creative way that defines human communication. Her brain had, in a sense, missed its chance to build the foundational architecture for language.

The Verdict: A Natural State of Silence

So, what have these dark tales taught us? What is humanity’s “natural” language?

The answer, it turns out, is none at all. There is no pre-installed linguistic software that boots up in the absence of input. Humans do not spontaneously speak Phrygian, Hebrew, or any other tongue. Our “natural” state, when raised in a linguistic vacuum, is silence.

What we have is not a natural language, but a natural ability to learn language. We are born with an incredible, innate capacity for language acquisition, but that capacity is just a seed. It requires the fertile soil of social interaction, ASR, and emotional connection to grow.

The story of Psamtik’s children babbling “bekos” shows us the raw, imitative ingredients of language. Frederick II’s tragic failure demonstrates that the “input” required is not just sound, but affection and engagement. And Genie’s difficult life proves that this process is time-sensitive, bound by a biological clock.

The ancient question of our original language was, it turns out, the wrong question. Language is not something we have innately, but something we do collectively. It isn’t an ancient artifact to be rediscovered, but a living, breathing social construct that we build anew with every generation, in the countless, loving interactions between a child and their world.