  Rousseau’s writings on language and languages are contained in two places, the unpublished Essay on the Origin of Languages and in a section of the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. In the Essay, Rousseau tells us that human beings want to communicate as soon as they recognize that there are other beings like themselves. But he also raises the question of why language, specifically, rather than gesture is needed for this purpose. The answer, strangely enough, is that language permits the communication of the passions in a way that gesture does not, and that the tone and stress of linguistic communication are crucial, rather than its content. This point enables Rousseau to make a close connection between the purposes of speech and melody. Such vocabulary as there originally was, according to Rousseau, was merely figurative and words only acquire a literal meaning much later. Theories that locate the origin of language in the need to reason together about matters of fact are, according to Rousseau, deeply mistaken. While the cry of the other awakens our natural compassion and causes us to imagine the inner life of others, our purely physical needs have an anti-social tendency because they scatter human beings more widely across the earth in search of subsistence. Although language and song have a common origin in the need to communicate emotion, over time the two become separated, a process that becomes accelerated as a result of the invention of writing. In the south, language stays closer to its natural origins and southern languages retain their melodic and emotional quality (a fact that suits them for song and opera). Northern languages, by contrast, become oriented to more practical tasks and are better for practical and theoretical reasoning.