There are about 7,500 languages on planet Earth today, but the number of languages spoken by humans a few thousand years ago was probably much larger, perhaps reaching tens of thousands.
Humanity has lost tens of thousands of languages over the past two millennia, according to linguists at Yale University who developed a demographic model to study the evolution of linguistic diversity. The findings were published in the journal Science.
The research team, led by historical linguist Claire Bowern, traced the evolution of languages over 12,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age. At that time, the Earth's population ranged between 4.4 and 7 million, most of whom lived in small hunter-gatherer groups. If each group of about 800 people had its own language, the number of languages likely at that time would have ranged from 3,300 to 7,800.
Computer modeling has revealed an unexpected evolution in linguistic diversity. As agriculture spread and settled societies emerged, the number of speakers of a single language increased, but linguistic diversity did not decline; rather, it witnessed a rapid rise.
This diversity reached its peak around 2000 years ago, with researchers estimating that the number of languages spoken at that time may have reached tens of thousands, nearly ten times the number likely at the end of the Ice Age.
This phenomenon is clearly evident in regions such as New Guinea and Vanuatu, where the languages and dialects of adjacent farming villages differ much more than those of adjacent hunter-gatherer groups in ancient times.
But this linguistic boom didn't last long, as diversity began to decline during the first millennium BC. Researchers attribute this to the expansion of human societies, population growth, and the rise of states and empires, which led to the spread of dominant languages at the expense of smaller ones.
Larger and more powerful societies began to absorb smaller groups, which gradually led to the disappearance of many local languages.
The study's authors emphasize that their model is still a preliminary hypothesis requiring further development, incorporating other factors such as migration and climate change. However, they believe the overall trend is clear: global linguistic diversity is steadily declining.
Currently, around 5 billion people speak only eleven major languages, while approximately 4 languages disappear annually around the world.
