First, why are they necessarily correlated? They could be two functions that happened for different reasons at different times. You'd have to be more specific by what you mean by languages and how you're determining self-awareness. Sometimes, I don't think some humans are self-aware. :P Then you could extrapolate from animals. Some animals are said to be self-aware. From wiki, Apes and monkey have been taught to recognize human language effectively. Whether dolphins or magpies can understand language is debatable, but there's more evidence that they do communicate with each other. Teaching apes and monkeys language hasn't made them more self-aware. If they are self-aware, their language doesn't seem to have developed much in the same time that human language has developed. I think the ability to communicate self-awareness to others comes from the ability to express language, but that doesn't mean that animals aren't doing the same. Humans just can't understand them if they are.Studies have been done mainly on primates to test if self-awareness is present. Apes, monkeys, elephants, and dolphins have been studied most frequently. The most relevant studies to this day that represent self-awareness in animals have been done on chimpanzees, dolphins, and magpies. Self-awareness in animals is tested through mirror self recognition. Animals who show mirror self recognition go through four stages 1) social response, 2) physical mirror inspection, 3) repetitive mirror testing behavior, and 4) the mark test; which involves the animals spontaneously touching a mark on their body which would have been difficult to see without the mirror.
through language* Language is merely a tool of self-expression. They aren't. One can comprehend themselves without being able to express it through human language.I think the ability to communicate self-awareness to others comes from the ability to express language
why are they necessarily correlated?
It's been argued, sometimes strongly, that language is a lense that affects how we view the world and probably by extension, ourselves. I should probably also point out that this post is just a throwaway thought and that I don't know enough to argue one way or another. ;)They aren't. One can comprehend themselves without being able to express it through human language.
I'm aware of the Sapir-Whorf theorem. It's a compelling theory; not necessarily the correct one, as science has been proven to be so devoid of throughout centuries, but compelling enough to inspire following. Maybe we're thinking about it all wrong. Maybe there was neither self-awareness nor self-expression when language was born - not in the way we see it now, anyway. Maybe there was something less bright yet moving enough for proto-humans to communicate about. We know many animals to express themselves - not in the artistic sense but in the sense of transmitting their thoughts and feelings: dolphins, wolves and elephants are just three examples. One of the theories of the origin of language that we were acquainted with during our Introduction to Linguistics course was Karl Marx' theory about common work (which isn't the name of it, but it describes the idea fairly well). The theory went on as follows: as humans developed in mental capacity, they found natural benefit in working in groups; to communicate within the group, humans came up with certain noises for certain things, and, in layman's terms, things just snowballed from there. Whether it includes self-awareness at this point was not stated during our introduction to it. I'm inclined to think that self-awareness came first because it would create the need for something to be expressed, and from there it was a mutually influential progress. I'd be happy to be proven wrong or illuminated on the matter.