When studying reports of creatures like Bigfoot, it all-too-often becomes a mind-numbing exercise in attempting to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff. A counter-balance begins to emerge in the questioning mind which weighs evidence against ideas, science against skepticism, and in some instances, heart against hopes and desires. In wanting so badly to unravel the mysteries behind such creatures—and even if they don’t exist, to try and better understand ways in which so little as an imaginary presence still affects cultures the world over—the mind is easily stifled and fatigued, with little hope for new discovery left to the imagination. At such times, many a researcher has wished that they could be given definite answers, and perhaps some notion of worth and finality. Imagine if only it were as simple as being told to “just say the word”, and all the secrets of Sasquatchery could be ours for the taking!

In reality, although no clandestine evidence of creatures like Sasquatch can be obtained as simply as merely “saying a word,” the truth may still be that words potentially hold more information about the reality of Sasquatches than we have ever imagined previously. To understand exactly how involves wrapping one’s mind around the notion of a proto-language, that is, an ancient “Mother Tongue” from which all human language stems. By learning about this ancient ancestor of modern languages, might clues begin to emerge about the nature of Sasquatch, and if so, how? To understand this, we must first learn what proto-language is, and how it was discovered.

In 1997, scholar William F. Allman wrote of in his essay The Mother Tongue a variety of ways that clues hidden in existing languages of today may point to an ancient “proto-language”. This “Mother Tongue”, historians, linguists and anthropologists assert, may have been the basis of all modern languages existing on Earth. “Because any number of sounds could be associated with a particular meaning, the presence of similar-sounding words with similar meanings in two different languages suggests that both languages had a common ancestor,” Allman says. “For instance, diners might order their coffee au lait, con leche or latte, depending on whether they are in a French, Spanish or Italian restaurant.” Allman says that using similar-sounding “daughter” words like this (using words for “milk” in the present example), paired with knowledge of how the sounds of words change over time as languages evolve, linguists would have been able to form a word very similar to the Latin root lacte, had knowledge of Latin not been available to modern scholars.

More importantly, using such techniques with earlier languages like Latin, Greek and Sanskrit has allowed researchers a glimpse at this ancient “proto-language” from which such classical languages may have descended. “The word for the number three, for instance, is tres in Latin, treis in Greek and tryas in Sanskrit,” Allman points out, detailing how dozens of languages including English, Swedish, German, Russian, Polish, Hindi, Persian, Welsh and Lithuanian, are all descendants of this same ancient proto-language. “Called Indo-European by linguists, this mother tongue was spoken some 8,000 years ago before the invention of writing,” which Allman says would be forgotten today, save only the traces left behind in the vocabularies of its hundreds of daughter languages.

Using the similarities found between so many different languages, linguists have assembled a small vocabulary of proto-Indo-European words which, not surprisingly, contain clues to the origins of the people who would have spoken the language centuries (if not thousands of years ago) when they first settled in modern Europe. For instance, Soviet linguists Thomas Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav Ivanov used similarities to extract words for a variety of domesticated animals like cattle and dogs; plants that include barley, flax and wheat have also been uncovered. What this suggests about the users of the Indo-European proto-language is that the people who spoke it were farmers, and existing words for landmarks like hillsides, mountains and rivers, points to the kind of areas they initially thrived; most likely a hilly terrain.

But with direct regard to creatures like Sasquatch, how might studying proto-languages present us with new insight into the creature’s behavior, eating habits, living conditions, or even culture, if such were to exist? Wouldn’t we first require evidence that Sasquatches actually had a language?

Surprisingly, this may be one element of the Bigfoot enigma for which there is a decent body of evidence, particularly evidenced in reports emanating from the Pacific Northwest. In my 2004 FATE Magazine article Voices in the Dark: Do Sasquatches Have a Language? I recounted the well-known and often revisited account of Sasquatch-abductee Albert Ostman, who claimed to have been kidnapped by a family of Sasquatches in 1924 near Toba Inlet, British Columbia. Ostman had been camping in the densely wooded area while searching for an abandoned silver mine, and after several nights where his campsite had apparently been pilfered, he went to sleep the night of his abduction with his gun and several essentials packed into his sleeping bag with him, fearing a hedgehog or some other creature might be the culprit. He awoke to find himself being carried along, his sleeping bag slung over the shoulder of some large upright walking creature as though it had been a knapsack. After what seemed like several hours, Ostman was finally placed on the ground before several Bigfoot creatures, which he said spoke to one another about his presence. The “Old Man”, a large male Ostman believed to be the one which had brought him to the place, “told” the others about the ordeal, “chattering” in some language he didn’t understand or recognize. After six days spent with these creatures, he made his escape to civilization.

Other reports of Sasquatch speech have been reported in the region, but with a bit of a unique twist; Chehalis natives from the Harrison Lake area have not only described hearing Sasquatch vocalizations which resembled speech, but claim to recognize it as a variant of their own language. J.W. Burns, a government agent who had lived alongside the Chehalis for several years during the 1920s, collected reports of encounters with Sasquatch creatures, including the odd tale of Charlie Victor. While hunting one afternoon, Victor claimed to have encountered a small, naked Caucasian boy, whom he accidentally wounded after firing into an opening in a tree, mistaking him for game. The injured youth rolled out of the opening, and began to cry loudly, to which, much to Victor’s surprise, responses began to echo back from the nearby woods. Suddenly, a large hair-covered woman appeared, who scooped up the boy, then turned to Victor with a furious glare and said, “you have hurt my friend.”

To Victor’s astonishment, the Sasquatch woman spoke these words in what is called “The Douglass Dialect”, said to be a 300-year-old variant on the Chehalis language which is seldom used (or even known) in modern times. As a result of this incident, Burns reported that Victor had always supposed a link existed between the two races, and that the Sasquatches were some kind of primitive relatives of the Chehalis Indians.

For years, researchers have questioned the validity of such stories, claiming that Natives often attribute “language” to animals of many varieties. This being the case, what would make a Bigfoot any different? However, the varying cultural perceptions of Bigfoot related phenomenon—speech in particular—does not seem to create a barrier in this instance, since our previous example featured Albert Ostman, who rather than having Native American heritage, was the son of immigrants. Also, one must consider the fact that anomalous “vocalizations” are often reported in conjunction with Sasquatch sightings, which, though seldom called “speech” or “language”, very well may be spoken words of some kind. Too often are such vocalizations stereotyped as “howls” and other animal-like calls, whereas in reality many reports describe “chattering” similar to Ostman’s description. In 1974, Russian researcher Alexander Katayev described an experience he had, where he had witnessed a male and female Sasquatch crouching together, which spoke to one another in voices reminiscent to him of “how deaf people sound when speaking”. Both creatures used gestures to accompany their vocalizations. Similarly, the late Archie Buckley, famed researcher of Bigfoot reports in the Pacific Northwest, once said “they communicate orally. On two separate occasions with colleagues, we have surprised a small group in their base camp, who upon a hurried retreat have resorted to a jargon that has the phonetics of a language when we got close to them.”

Many other instances of “Sasquatch language” exist, but as astounding as this notion may be all on its own, this isn’t the primary focal point of the present discussion. Instead, thinking back to our notion of a “Mother Tongue”, what if techniques used to decipher ancient words from a deceased proto-language (which, if you remember, were indicative of the habitat and lifestyle of those who spoke it) could be useful in learning things about Sasquatches? This, of course, requires the following bold assumptions:

a) That Sasquatches exist, and perhaps even

b) That Sasquatches have, at very least, some form of rudimentary language.

This being the case, if we can wrap our minds around such notions for the sake of learning things otherwise incapable of being obtained, thanks to our obvious limitations regarding interaction with Sasquatches, imagine what revelations we may uncover?

Back in the late 1990s, a Stanford University linguist named Joseph Greenberg proposed a controversial theory that all Native American languages can be grouped into three families, corresponding to three separate “waves of migration” across the Bering Strait thousands of years ago. “The largest, oldest and most controversial group proposed by Greenberg is a macrofamily that he calls Amerind, which is made up of all the languages in South and Central America as well as many in North America,” William Allman notes in his studies regarding this clandestine “Mother Tongue”. “The other two language groups arc Na-Dene, which includes tongues spoken by Native Americans in the Northwest as well as Navajo and Apache, and Eskimo-Aleut, which contains languages spoken mostly in the Arctic: this group was the last to arrive in the New World.”

Looking at the notion of linguistic similarities between all Native American languages—all the while remembering things like Charlie Victor’s encounter with a Sasquatch woman who spoke his language in a slightly different dialect—new possibilities begin to emerge. For instance, after reading a recent entry over at the Cryptomundo web site, I was reminded of George Eberhart’s reference books on cryptozoology and anomalous occurrences. In one such book, titled Mysterious Creatures (the nearest copy of which I found at a university nearly two hours drive from my town), Eberhart includes an entry on a creature indigenous to British Columbia called the Nakani, described as “a cannibal giant of northwestern North America,” the common name for which is “the Bushman”. Among the variations of names given for this entity are Na’in, Nakentlia, and Nant’ina, all classifiable under Greenberg’s Na-Dené language grouping from the earlier example. Neginla-eh, Nik’inla’eena, and Nuk-luk all appear to be Pacific Gulf Yupik variations of the word for “wood-man” that fall under Greenberg’s separate Eskimo-Aleut grouping. If Greenberg’s theory that all Native American languages stem from an earlier Mother-Tongue holds any water, these obvious similarities could be expected. However, what else could these kinds of similarities indicate? The obvious implication here is that the similarities between these words, common to two separate Native groups under Greenberg’s classification, may indicate a proto-language root word—a “Mother” term used to refer to creatures of this sort—used thousands of years ago. In short, Natives who settled the Americas thousands of years ago knew these creatures existed, and had already given them a name.

So let’s suppose a common root word which evolved differently in languages which separated, moving apart and changing with the cultures who spoke them, could indicate that knowledge existed of these “Bushmen” long ago. Could this word, or terms like it, be traced even further back to times pre-dating migration into the Americas? In other words, could similar names for such creatures be found in parts of Asia, perhaps indicating an early root-word existed common to cultures there, which later migrated into the Americas? Furthermore, could there be some way in which to reverse the process of tracing words back to their most primitive roots? In this way, could a method of looking for contextual clues in ancient proto-languages provide any new insights into the reality of Sasquatches, who or what they are, where they come from, and perhaps most important of all, provide historical evidence of their existence?