Study suggests a lost “golden age” of language diversity

The roughly 7,500 languages spoken today represent only a fraction of the linguistic diversity that once existed. A new study published in Science suggests that humanity may have spoken tens of thousands of languages only a few thousand years ago.

Branco Weiss Fellow Damián Blasi and his co-authors Marcus J. Hamilton, Claire Bowern and Russell D. Gray reconstructed the long-term history of language diversity by combining ethnographic evidence, demographic reconstructions and computational modelling. Their analysis spans the past 12,000 years and offers the first quantitative estimate of how the number of human languages has changed over time.

Challenging a common assumption, the researchers conclude that linguistic diversity did not simply decline from prehistoric times onwards. Instead, it increased steadily as human populations expanded after the advent of agriculture, reaching an extraordinary peak between about 3,000 and 1,000 years ago. The authors describe this period as a global linguistic “golden age,” when tens of thousands of distinct languages may have coexisted.

The study argues that the subsequent decline began long before modern globalization. As kingdoms, states and later empires expanded, many small language communities disappeared, taking with them unique traditions, knowledge systems and cultural practices. European colonialism accelerated this process but did not initiate it.

The findings have implications well beyond linguistics. They suggest that today’s languages represent a historically biased sample of humanity’s past cultural diversity and that extinction, rather than adaptation alone, has played a major role in shaping the languages that survive today.

The paper attracted international media attention. Within days, the study was covered by numerous international media outlets, including The Independent, El País, Daily Mail, Phys.org, The Debrief and many others.

Damián Blasi has also been named as a recipient of the Early Career Impact Award of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS). The award recognizes early-career scientists who have made outstanding contributions to the sciences of mind, brain and behavior.

Read the article in Science: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adx4343

Read the summary by Max-Planck-Gesellschaft: https://www.mpg.de/26871018/the-lost-golden-age-of-language-diversity