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Humanity speaks roughly 7,500 languages today, yet a few disappear every year. According to new calculations, this loss has been ongoing for about two millennia—and has accelerated sharply in recent centuries. Just before that decline, during the “golden age” of linguistic diversity, Earth may have been home to tens of thousands of languages.
A Vast Range of Human Expression
Sound, grammar, vocabulary—human language has produced extraordinary diversity. Today, researchers estimate around 7,500 languages, including sign languages. That number may seem high, but records from the past 500 years show a rapid and systematic decline, largely in favor of a handful of global languages. The most widely spoken today include English, Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, and Arabic.
Nearly five billion people speak one of the ten most common languages, writes the team led by Damián Blasi of Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona in Science. At the same time, half of all languages are endangered, and roughly four disappear forever each year. Each loss erases cultural knowledge, prompting efforts to document smaller languages—such as through UNESCO’s Atlas of Endangered Languages.
A Past Hard to Reconstruct
How far back linguistic diversity stretches is difficult to determine. Written records only go back about 6,000 years, and even within that period, most languages were never documented. Comprehensive linguistic description is a relatively recent practice.
Researchers assume that early humans—and even other human species such as Neanderthals—communicated verbally in some form. It is therefore likely that they used more than one type of language.
What is clear, the authors note, is that the spread of most languages spoken today (or their ancestors) coincided with cultural and technological developments that boosted population growth—such as the domestication of plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, China, and the Andes. But which other languages existed at the time can no longer be reconstructed.
Estimating Humanity’s Earliest Languages
To make at least quantitative inferences about ancient linguistic diversity, Blasi’s team relied on indirect methods. They built a model using ethnographic data from 171 known hunter‑gatherer societies, as a proxy for the global population around 12,000 years ago and in the millennia that followed.
Group size in such societies is limited by several factors, the study explains: food requirements, mobility range, and social cohesion, which becomes difficult beyond a certain size. According to the model, early human groups averaged around 800 members.
The researchers assumed that each hunter‑gatherer group spoke one language—meaning the number of groups roughly equaled the number of languages. Only later, as communities grew larger and more complex, did this one‑to‑one relationship dissolve.
They combined these assumptions with population estimates for early humanity, which range from 4.4 to 7 million people. Dividing total population by average group size yields an estimate of the number of languages 12,000 years ago. The team then modeled linguistic development in 1,000‑year steps.
An Explosion of Linguistic Diversity
The calculations suggest that 12,000 years ago, Earth had fewer languages than today—between 4,500 and 6,200. But as the global population grew, the number of languages likely multiplied dramatically.
This increase continued even during the rise of the first major empires around 4,000 years ago, such as in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The peak of linguistic diversity was probably reached between 3,000 and 1,000 years ago.
Although the estimates carry significant uncertainty, the researchers believe the number of languages may have increased tenfold during this period. In this “golden age,” humanity may have spoken tens of thousands of distinct languages.
Only afterward did linguistic diversity decline rapidly—accelerating again in recent history. The current pace suggests troubling prospects for the future.
Cultural Diversity in Retreat
The languages that survive today are not a representative sample. Large language families expanded and absorbed smaller ones; languages—and the cultures tied to them—disappeared in favor of dominant groups.
Multilingualism has increased, and many people no longer speak their ancestral language. These language contacts contribute to homogenization, making languages globally and regionally less diverse. The authors warn that linguistic change is now progressing faster than ever.
The findings show that today’s crisis in language diversity began long before colonialism, which is often blamed for the decline. As the team emphasizes, the issue is not only linguistic: the dramatic loss also affects cultures, many of which have recently faced mass extinction driven by global migration, technology, and disease.
- Hector Pascua with reference from orf.at/picture: pixabay.com
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