Study documents a precipitous decline in the number of languages

The world currently uses approximately 7,500 languages, with English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, and French being the most prevalent. However, this number is a fraction of the linguistic diversity humanity has experienced historically.

“

Languages are meaningful to their communities. They carry knowledge, associations and memories.

Researchers employed mathematical modeling, drawing on anthropology, linguistics, and demography, to estimate the number of languages spoken globally over the past 12,000 years, during the Holocene epoch. Their findings suggest that during the first millennium BC and the first millennium AD, humanity might have spoken tens of thousands of distinct languages. This period is identified as a linguistic "golden age," followed by a significant decline.

The study highlights that language replacement, fueled by the expansion of large empires in antiquity and European colonialism in recent centuries, has led to this precipitous drop. Claire Bowern, a linguistics and anthropology professor at Yale University and a study leader, emphasized the importance of languages, stating they carry knowledge, associations, and memories for communities. For scientists, languages offer vast information about the past and provide insights into the human mind.

“

For scientists, languages carry huge ⁠amounts of information about the past, from where people lived to what they ate, and what they talked about. They also give us a window into the human mind.

Language families evolved over millennia, with written language emerging independently in various regions like Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica. The researchers estimate that the peak number of languages used worldwide at any one time could have ranged from 30,000 to over 75,000. Damian Blasi, the study's lead author, noted that until a few thousand years ago, humanity inhabited a far more culturally diverse world than today.

“

We rarely appreciate that, until just a few thousand years ago, humanity inhabited a vastly more diverse cultural world than the one we know today.

To overcome the lack of direct historical evidence, researchers utilized data from 171 extant hunter-gatherer societies across Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. They assessed the size of ethnolinguistic groups and applied this to estimates of the human population at the beginning of the Holocene, simulating language diversification through time.

“

There’s no direct evidence for language numbers until very recently. We cannot rely on the extremely patchy records from antiquity. But because we know a ​lot about the relationships between languages and societies, we can use a couple of assumptions to make a simulation model of language diversification through time.