The World's Linguistic 'Golden Age'
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A new study reveals that humans may once have spoken as many as 20,000 to 75,000 different languages during an era they’ve dubbed the linguistic 'golden age'.
Today, humans speak about 7,500 languages, which is significantly less than the number we spoke in the not-so-distant past - between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 1000 - according to the study.
“The most unexpected result is how recent the peak appears to have been. The period of greatest linguistic diversity may have occurred not in the remote Palaeolithic, but during the era of expanding states and early empires,” says study co-author Claire Bowern.
Using social-computational models, population estimates, and ethnographic data, the researchers tried to fill in the gaps of “the rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene” - a period from 11,700 years ago to present day. They reported that linguistic diversity peaked during a window between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 1000 before dipping due to the expansion of large states and empires replacing smaller tongues with more dominant languages.
“The languages we see today are the survivors of a massive and highly selective historical bottleneck,” added fellow author Damian Blasi. “A linguistic feature may be common not because it is inherently superior, but because it happened to be carried by populations that expanded.”
The study notes that before the onset of plant and animal domestication, the number of languages was smaller than it is today (4,500 to 6,000 compared with 7,500). Subsequent increases in global population precipitated increased linguistic diversity. We uncovered a linguistic 'golden age' with tens of thousands of languages 3000 to 1000 years ago.
The Countries That Speak The Most Languages: In most countries around the world, there are one or two dominant languages that are spoken. But that's certainly not the case everywhere.
