Our growth and progress as a species would have been significantly affected if humans had never learned to speak. Human communication relies heavily on language, which enables humans to coordinate actions, communicate knowledge, and create complex societies.
Humans may have communicated more through nonverbal cues like gestures and facial expressions if they hadn’t developed language. However, this wouldn’t have been very effective in communicating difficult concepts or abstract notions.
Without language, human culture most likely would have changed drastically. It’s possible that language-dependent arts like music, literature, and art never developed at all or not at all. It’s possible that religion and spirituality, which are frequently expressed through language, have evolved differently or not at all.
Language has a very significant role in the advancement of science and technology as well as finding our place in the world with it’s relative use. After all we all are just the subsets of our the constructs of our language that we are served with. Without the ability to communicate and cooperate on scientific discoveries, it’s plausible that humans would have evolved other investigative techniques.
Language has contributed significantly to the social organisation of human communities. Humans have been able to create complex social organisations like governments, religions, and economics thanks to their capacity for communication and teamwork. Human communities might have stayed small and isolated without language, with little capacity to collaborate on difficult tasks or create intricate social structures.
Overall, our evolution and progress as a species would have been very different if humans had never learned to speak. It is very hard to imagine in what direction our development would have gone possibly even being extinct , but it is evident that language has had a significant impact on the development of human culture, society, and technology. Even with the fast changing world language still exists but has reduced it’s form from more of complex imperative dialogues to lingos and pictorials. It feels like going a full circle from hitting stones and tress to communicate to now possibly going towards a future where our speech dependance will be reduced through telepathic neuralinks.