Study Shows Dramatic, Long-Term Drop in Global Language Diversity

WASHINGTON, July 27 (Reuters) - A new study reconstructing language use across the Holocene epoch finds that global linguistic diversity has fallen sharply over millennia. Today about 7,500 languages are spoken worldwide (counting native and nonnative users), but researchers estimate that humanity once used tens of thousands of distinct languages at its historical peak.

How Researchers Reconstructed the Past

The team combined mathematical modeling with evidence and methods from anthropology, linguistics and demography to estimate language counts over roughly the past 12,000 years. Because direct historical records are sparse, they used assumptions about the relationships between social groups and languages and simulated how languages diversify and disappear over time.

To estimate early ethnolinguistic group sizes, the researchers analyzed data from 171 extant hunter-gatherer societies across Africa, South America and Southeast Asia and applied those patterns to population estimates for the start of the Holocene. Their model suggests that around 12,000 years ago there may have been about 4,500 to 6,200 languages.

When Diversity Peaked—and Why It Fell

The analysis indicates a peak in linguistic diversity between the first millennium BC and the first millennium AD, when tens of thousands of languages may have been in use. The authors estimate a historical high in the range of roughly 30,000 to possibly more than 75,000 languages at any one time.

Subsequent millennia saw major declines driven by factors that replace, merge or extinguish languages: the expansion of large empires in antiquity, population displacement and collapse, and more recently European colonialism and its language policies. Language loss occurs when entire communities disappear, when speakers shift voluntarily to other tongues, or when they are coerced into abandoning their native languages.

"Languages are meaningful to their communities. They carry knowledge, associations and memories," said Claire Bowern, professor of linguistics and anthropology at Yale and a study leader. "For scientists, languages contain enormous information about the past — from where people lived to what they ate — and they offer a window into the human mind."

Languages also evolve: for example, Latin gradually transformed into French, Italian and Spanish after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Colonial-era language policies further accelerated replacement — examples include English suppression of Irish, Spain and Portugal restricting indigenous languages in the Americas, France promoting French in African colonies, and Japan suppressing Korean during its rule over Korea. Still, many indigenous languages persisted despite repression.

What This Means Today

About half of the world’s languages are now considered endangered. The researchers highlight an extreme imbalance: roughly 90% of the global population speaks only 10% of the world’s languages, leaving many languages with very small speaker populations and at high risk of disappearing.

Study lead author Damian Blasi, a cognitive scientist and evolutionary anthropologist at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies, emphasized the lost cultural breadth: "Until just a few thousand years ago, humanity inhabited a vastly more diverse cultural world than the one we know today."

(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Daniel Wallis)