The peak of linguistic diversity on the planet did not fall in the distant Paleolithic past, but in the period between one and three thousand years ago. It was then, according to a new study, that tens of thousands of languages were spoken on Earth — far more than the roughly seven and a half thousand in use today.
Researchers from Spain, the United States and Germany reconstructed changes in the linguistic landscape over the past twelve thousand years. They drew on ethnographic data about traditional societies, estimates of Holocene population numbers and statistical modeling. The results, published in the journal Science, show that the decline began long before European colonization and coincided with the rise of large states and empires.
The expansion of such entities led to sustained contacts between previously isolated groups. Dominant languages spread along with political institutions, technologies and, at times, diseases. Small communities could be absorbed or displaced, and their languages ceased to be passed on to the next generations. The Roman Empire is one example often mentioned in discussions, although the model does not link specific losses to individual states.
“The most unexpected result is how recent the peak looks,” notes Yale University linguist Claire Bowern. The maximum was followed by a sharp contraction, especially over the last two thousand years. European colonization certainly intensified the process, but its roots go deeper — into the era of the first multinational powers.
Today's languages appear as survivors of a large-scale and selective historical “bottleneck.” This means that many features of modern languages may be widespread precisely because the speakers of those languages once expanded their influence. The global model does not provide an exact census of ancient languages and does not allow specific wars or epidemics to be named as the culprits behind particular losses.
The study emphasizes that linguistic diversity grew along with population during the emergence of agriculture, but then political centralization began to reduce it. The question of how representative today's languages are of the entire history of humankind remains open and requires further refinement.
Understanding these processes helps us assess more precisely which features of languages and cultures we consider universal and which are the result of historical selection.
