There are over 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, but this is just a fraction of the number that once existed. That is because we are losing more than four languages every year.
The trend is not new — linguistic diversity appears to have peaked around 1,000 to 3,000 years ago, before declining, according to new research published in Science and led by Damián Blasi, a research professor of linguistics at Harvard University. But it may be accelerating: it’s estimated that half the world’s languages are endangered.
“Languages are meaningful to their communities. They carry knowledge, associations, and memories,” co-author Claire Bowern, a professor of linguistics at Yale University, told Discover. “For scientists, languages carry huge amounts of information about the past, from where people lived to what they ate, and what they talked about. They also give us a window into the human mind.”
Tracking Linguistic Diversity Over Time
It might appear somewhat ironic. The global population is increasing rapidly — and with it, the number of people who use language — yet linguistic diversity is declining. Today, in a world of more than 8 billion people, 5 billion speak one of the ten most common languages.
This was not the case a few thousand years ago. Despite a much smaller population, there was a linguistic “golden age,” according to the researchers.
Blasi, Bowern and colleagues came to this conclusion after combining computer modeling techniques with ethnographic data and population estimates. Doing so enabled the team to trace how the number of languages has risen and fallen since the end of the last ice age, approximately 12,000 years ago, even though written records exist only for the last 6,000 years and not all languages are written.
In this study, modern hunter-gatherer societies served as a proxy for early human foraging societies. The researchers found these communities tend to be small, culturally cohesive, and use a single language. By comparing their size to estimates of early human populations, the team was able to estimate the number of languages spoken at any one time during the early Holocene.
Just as the model assumed that the size of foraging societies remained stable over time and that each group possessed a single language, it also assumed that agriculture enabled communities to grow. This meant global population increased at a faster rate than linguistic diversity and more people shared the same language.
The Demographic Boost Hypothesis
The results were then compared to and tested against different theories. One was that the number of languages has been in steady decline since the last ice age, as agriculture-based societies have expanded and replaced foraging societies, a view known as the Megadiverse Paleolithic Hypothesis. Another was that the number of languages remained largely consistent until the start of colonization approximately 500 years ago, after which it began to shrink, a pattern known as the Premodern Equilibrium Hypothesis.
The third — and best-supported, according to the study — was the Demographic Boost Hypothesis. The advent of agriculture provided a stable food supply, enabling populations to grow and people to migrate, which in turn allowed languages to survive, spread, and diversify. That is, until there was a shift towards large states with a single language.
At its peak, the model suggests there may have been tens of thousands of languages — a ten-fold increase in the number that existed pre-agriculture, which the model estimated to be between 4,500 and 6,000. Though, as the researchers caution, there is considerable uncertainty in these estimates, and they hinge on certain assumptions.
“Agriculture is both a cause of extensive linguistic diversity and also the cause of its extensive reduction,” said Bowern. “That is, small-scale agriculture leads to linguistic proliferation, but as it gets more intensive, it reverses much of that earlier proliferation.”
But while there are clearly major downsides to the loss of language, there is at least one benefit of widespread language: access to information.
“Gaining widespread languages doesn't mean that other languages have to be lost,” added Bowern. “After all, more than half the world's population is multilingual!”
Read More: Human Language May Be Secretly Built Around Safety, Challenging Decades of Thinking
Article Sources
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- This article references information from a study published inScience:The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene