A global “golden age” of languages could have emerged in recent history if expanding states and ancient empires had not driven a sharp decline in linguistic diversity, according to a new study reconstructing how the world’s languages changed over the past 12,000 years.
The research, published in Science, estimates that tens of thousands of languages were spoken between about 1,000 and 3,000 years ago, far more than the roughly 7,500 used today.
Researchers say the downturn began before European colonial expansion and coincided with the growth of multinational states whose languages, cultures and pathogens spread into previously separate communities.
The Roman Empire is among the historical examples cited in coverage of the findings. But the model does not identify Rome or any other specific empire as the cause of particular language losses. The international research team included scholars based in Spain, the United States and Germany.
How ancient empires helped end a global “golden age” of languages
Researchers combined ethnographic data, prehistoric population estimates and statistical modeling. They examined 171 hunter-gatherer and fisher societies to estimate early ethnolinguistic group sizes, then compared them with reconstructions of the human population near the start of the Holocene.
The models suggest about 4,500 to 6,200 languages existed roughly 12,000 years ago. As agriculture and more stable food supplies supported population growth, the number of languages increased for thousands of years, even as language communities grew larger.
“The most unexpected result is how recent the peak appears to have been,” Claire Bowern, a Yale University linguist and study co-author, said in a Max Planck Society statement.
After the peak, the models show a steep contraction, particularly during the past two millennia. Researchers say expanding political systems brought separated populations into sustained contact and extended the reach of dominant languages. Smaller communities could be absorbed or displaced, while their languages stopped being passed to later generations.
Language loss began long before European colonial expansion
European colonialism later intensified language replacement on a vast scale, researchers said, but the study argues the broader decline had deeper roots.
The findings also raise questions about how representative today’s languages are. Study co-author Russell Gray described them as survivors of a “massive and highly selective historical bottleneck.” That could mean some linguistic features are common partly because the populations carrying them expanded.
The reconstruction remains uncertain. It is a global model, not a census of ancient languages, and it cannot identify individual wars, epidemics, or empires responsible for specific losses.
Lyle Campbell, a University of Hawaii linguist who was not involved in the research, told Scientific American the work was “highly speculative,” pointing to the difficulty of establishing key conditions in the distant past.
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