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Harvard and Yale Researchers Find Lost ‘Golden Age’ of Language
Researchers estimated 20,000 to 75,000 languages at the peak, then found diversity declined rapidly as farming expanded populations.
- On July 23, researchers published a study in Science revealing that global language diversity peaked between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago, when tens of thousands of distinct languages were spoken worldwide.
- Yale linguist Claire Bowern and her team modeled linguistic trajectories over 12,000 years, estimating that tens of thousands of tongues were spoken during this peak—far exceeding the roughly 7,500 languages spoken today.
- The expansion of hegemonic, multinational states, such as the Roman Empire, drove this decline by assimilating smaller communities and forcing their own languages onto subjugated groups, causing regional dialects to disappear.
- Harvard University researcher Damian Blasi noted that modern languages are "survivors of a massive and highly selective historical bottleneck." Extinction has shaped linguistic diversity far more profoundly than previously understood.
- Today, more than 3,000 languages are endangered, with 437 listed as critically endangered. Yet ancient extinction rates were even faster, suggesting that language loss is not uniquely modern.
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54 Articles
54 Articles
There are currently around 7500 languages in the world. You think that's a lot? According to researchers, there was once a lot more.
·Hamburg, Germany
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Before the emergence of agriculture, however, the world was probably not exceptionally rich in languages.
·Barcelona, Spain
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Tens of thousands of languages could have existed in ancient times - as many as before and never again afterwards. What started the decline of linguistic diversity?
·Munich, Germany
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At the beginning of the Holocene about 12,000 years ago, between 4500 and 6200 languages were spoken, writes a research team from Spain, the USA and Germany in the journal "Science".
·Vienna, Austria
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Total News Sources54
Leaning Left11Leaning Right13Center18Last UpdatedBias Distribution43% Center
Bias Distribution
- 43% of the sources are Center
43% Center
L 26%
C 43%
R 31%
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