Language is an evolved system showing properties that have been selected as functionally adaptive and which outweigh their potentially negative consequences. What is special about human sociality that makes language adaptive for us? It is the goal of this course to examine the interactive and cognitive environments, and the social and communicative functions that have shaped human language to take the familiar forms we know today. We survey the interdisciplinary field of language evolution integrating studies of cognitive, cultural, social, and biological aspects of human language. We will consider how language exhibits some organizational properties that are unique to humans and others that are shared with different species. We will study the evolution of speech physiology and the semiotics of speech and gesture in the multimodal communicative environments in which language evolved. This class offers the opportunity to contrast theories of language evolution that focus on speech from those that focus on gesture and work to develop a synthesis. Our discussions will include questions of how cross-cultural and cross-species studies of child-caregiver interactions informs our understanding of language evolution and what can studies of primate social interactions tell us about the structure of human conversations. We will also consider the genetics of FOXP2, which was once called the "language gene," but is known to be expressed in other species like songbirds that show vocal learning through imitation and feedback. We will examine how prosodic qualities, like pitch, melody, and tempo work to frame speech and compare other uniquely human activities like dance, music, and religion that have formal relations to the symbolic and interactional qualities of language.