Humanity spoke thousands of languages at the dawn of farming — now many of them are lost - Nature

What the report says

Nature reported that a new study in Science estimates humanity may have used far more languages in the past than are spoken today, with linguistic diversity possibly reaching tens of thousands of languages between about 3,000 and 1,000 years ago. That would be well above the more than 7,500 languages currently in use worldwide, according to the article.

The study, by Claire Bowern of Yale University and colleagues, attempted to model global language diversity over the past 12,000 years, a period for which direct evidence is scarce because languages rarely leave archaeological traces unless writing survives. The researchers began with an estimate for the end of the last glacial period, dividing the approximate human population by an assumed shared-language group size of about 800 people, based partly on 20th-century evidence from Indigenous Alaskan groups and wider historical language data. That produced an estimate of roughly 3,300 to 7,800 languages 12,000 years ago.

Nature said the team’s statistical model then accounted for major social changes, including the spread of farming, more permanent settlements and, later, larger political units. The analysis suggests language diversity rose as agricultural communities became more common and peaked around 2,000 years ago, before declining.

The proposed explanation is that farming settlements may have created smaller, more isolated communities whose speech diverged faster than that of more mobile hunter-gatherer groups. Nature noted that outside experts described the results as striking while emphasizing the uncertainty in reconstructing ancient language diversity. If the model is broadly correct, it would suggest language loss has deep historical roots, not only a modern-era pattern.