Therefore is the name of it called Babel;
because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and
from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the
earth. Genesis 11:9
"The early chapters of Genesis make several important points about the world’s first language that can be summarized here:
1) Adam named every living creature that God brought to him 
(Genesis 2:19),
Q: but on what basis?
Q: Did he just invent a combination of sounds or did he try to describe the creature before him, in which case in what language?
2) The Table of the Nations (Genesis 10:1–32) divides the peoples of the world into three groups—the descendants of Noah’s sons Japheth, Ham, and Shem. A total of 70 nations are listed. There is no simple link between descent from a particular son of Noah and language, but generally speaking Japheth fathers the Indo-European-speaking peoples, Ham, the Hamitic-speaking peoples and Shem, the Semitic-speaking peoples.
3) The story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1–9 gives an 
explanation for linguistic diversity and makes three basic points:
a) Originally there was just one universal language (11:1).
b) When the Lord confused the language of the people, new languages were generated. .... the people were unable to understand each other and so scattered over the face of the whole earth.
c) The location of this incident is placed in Shinar which may be the land inhabited by the Sumerians, i.e. southern Iraq (11:1). The city, of which the tower was a part, was Babel (‘confused’), the Hebrew word for Babylon (11:9).
*It is noteworthy that
---although languages within a language family have many common features,
---surprisingly few of these features are shared with languages from another language family,
---suggesting that the proto-languages and progenitors of modern isolates arose at the original confusion of languages that the Book of Genesis records as happening at the Tower of Babel."
CMI/Paul J.N. Lawrence
