The modest requirements of Fuegian intercourse have called more than twenty such separate pronouns into being.
Without attempting to go thoroughly into the efforts of primitive speech to curtail its interest in the personnel of its world by gradually acquiring a stock of de-individualized words, let us glance at another aspect of the subject, because it helps to bring out the fundamental fact that language is a social product, a means of intersubjective intercourse developed within a society that hands on to a new generation the verbal experiments that are found to succeed best.

Payne shows reason for believing that the collective "we" precedes "I" in the order of linguistic evolution.

To begin with, in America and elsewhere, "we" may be inclusive and mean "all-of-us," or selective, meaning "some-of-us-only." Hence, we are told, a missionary must be very careful, and, if he is preaching, must use the inclusive "we" in saying "we have sinned," lest the congregation assume that only the clergy have sinned; whereas, in praying, he must use the selective "we," or God would be included in the list of sinners.
Similarly, "I" has a collective form amongst some American languages, and this is ordinarily employed, whereas the corresponding selective form is used only in special cases.

Thus if the question be "Who will help ?" the Apache will reply "I-amongst-others," "I-for-one"; but, if he were recounting his own personal exploits, he says _sheedah_, "I-by-myself," to show that they were wholly his own.

Here we seem to have group-consciousness holding its own against individual self-consciousness, as being for primitive folk on the whole the more normal attitude of mind.
Another illustration of the sociality engrained in primitive speech is to be found in the terms employed to denote relationship.
"My-mother," to the child of nature, is something more than an ordinary mother like yours.