I'm actually a linguist so I know about this stuff. As far as how the Society would answer your question, I think they can simply fall back on their usual ostrich excuse by saying that these calculations by linguists as just "guesswork", "riddled with assumptions", hardly anything to compare with the word of God on the matter. Oh course, when you actually trouble yourself to examine the evidence, it is not as easily dismissed....and the Society's position that all languages developed from c. 2270 BC onward (i.e. after the Tower of Babel) appears as the least likely of possible hypotheses. I know of no empirical evidence that would point an unbiased researcher towards so young a date and quite a lot of evidence indicating far, far more antiquity to language.
I grappled with this question as a Witness, and even more so with the historical question....can the Sumerian and Akkadian dynasties be squeezed into the few hundred years after the Flood, can the Egyptian Old Kingdom and early Chinese dynasties be squeezed into the period after "Babel," plus giving enough time for enough ppl to be born and enough time for them to hurry over to their locales around the globe? Then there's the linguistic evidence. We can compare words in various Indo-European languages, from Sanskrit in India to Hittite to Latin to Gothic to Celtic to Old Church Slavonic, and we can very neatly account for the sound differences between the languages and with ease reconstruct the original proto-words from the original mother language of the Indo-European languages. The situation is far from "confusion" -- the sound correspondences between the languages were so regular that Neo-grammarians of the 1800s described them as Laws -- Verner's Law, Grimm's Law, etc. None of the daughter languages preserves the original form of this language in its entirety -- Sanskrit has preserved the morphological case system more than Latin or Greek, Hittite preserved the laryngeals more than any of the other descendant languages, etc. But we know from ancient written records that Sanskrit existed by 1500 BC, Greek existed by 1600 BC (Mycenaen Linear B), Hittite existed by 2000 BC at the latest. And by 2000-1500 BC the languages were already very different from each other. The original protolanguage was spoken by 3000 BC at the latest, 5000 BC at the earliest. And we can similarly reconstruct other protolanguages, such as Proto-Uralic which goes back to the same period, Proto-Austronesian which goes back to 4000-3000 BC, and so on and so forth.
The biggest problem of all for the Society's view is that of Semitic and other Afro-Asiatic languages. We know that Akkadian, the language of the Babylonians and of the Akkadians before them, was spoken in Mesopotamia as far back as 2500 BC at the latest. The Akkadian kingdom of Sargon the Great goes back to 2340 BC. But the Akkadians were preceded by the Sumerians who had an altogether unrelated language and who had been living for hundreds of years before that. So we know that at the time Babel supposedly was built, there were two languages at least in the land. When I was trying to harmonize things, I placed the very first Sumerian dynasties immediately after the flood -- so Ham's Shem's and Japheth's children could begin ruling cities in Sumer about 20 years after the flood. That would give me about 80 years or so for all the pre-Babel Sumerian dynasties so that Babel could be built around 2269 BC and all the nations dispersed from thence. If I made the date of Babel any later, that would take away valuable time needed for the Egyptian Old Kingdom dynasties. But here's what made the whole endeavor collapse: We have inscriptions and burials from the first dynasty of Ur, which made concurrent with all the other dynasties, I placed rather immediately after the flood. The burial of queen Pu-abi had a great death pit of some 75 royal servants who were ceremoniously slaughtered. Is that something we would expect of a tiny population recovering from near total annihilation from a deluge?? But I digress.....
The Akkadian language, which goes back to the third millenium BC is quite divergent from the Northwest Semitic languages, of which Hebrew is a dialectal variety. Hebrew has lost many features preserved in Akkadian. The Ebla tablets from Syria attest the Northwest Semitic dialects as existing at least as far back as the third millenium. And then there are the South Semitic languages -- Arabic in particular, which is again divergent but consistently so. We can easily compare them and reconstruct the original forms of the mother language of all of them, and the amount of divergence between the languages suggests that they descend from a Proto-Semitic language going back to about 5000 BC. But that is not all. The Semitic languages are closely related to other Afro-Asiatic languages, including ancient Egyptian (which we know from texts goes back to before 3000 BC), Ethiopic, Hausa, and the Berber languages. The original Afro-Asiatic parent language then probably goes back to 9,000-7,000 BC. And some linguists controversially argue that Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and Uralic together all descend from another parent language which they call Nostratic, which would then date back to 10,000 BC or even earlier.
Like the historical evidence of civilization and the archaeological evidence of human settlement, linguisitic evidence points to far more time depth than the Society allows.
Leolaia