Three Millennia Ago, Humans May Have Spoken Thousands More Languages Than We Have Today, During a Linguistic 'Golden Age'
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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74 Articles
Today, there are about 7,500 spoken and sign languages in the world, but according to a new study, this is only a small fraction of the linguistic wealth that mankind once possessed, says Science Alert. Scientists believe that the golden age of linguistic diversity has arrived between 1000 and 3000 years ago, when tens of thousands of languages could exist at the same time, followed by a sharp decline that began before European colonial expansio…
There May Have Once Been 75K Human Languages
If you think the world's 7,500 languages sounds like a lot, a new study argues we may be living in the linguistic leftovers. Researchers writing in Science estimate that between 20,000 and 75,000 languages were spoken during a "golden age" of linguistic diversity roughly 3,000 years...
There are currently around 7500 languages in the world. You think that's a lot? According to researchers, there was once a lot more.
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