🌅 Humanity’s Lost “Linguistic Golden Age”

SOURCE

Blasi et al. (2026)

WHAT TO KNOW

• A new study by an international team of researchers suggests a “golden age” of linguistic diversity flourished on Earth around 2,000 years ago, when a peak of some 20,000 to 75,000 languages could have been used globally. The researchers found, prior to agriculture taking root some 12,000 years ago, humans used between 4,500 to 6,200 languages. However, after the domestication of plants and animals, the number of languages ballooned alongside the global population.

WHY IT MATTERS

• After reaching the peak of linguistic diversity some two millennia ago, the world experienced a rapid decline in languages, resulting in around 7,500 languages spoken or signed on Earth today. The authors found humanity’s abundance of languages fell as hegemonic, multinational states began to rise, such as the Roman Empire. To put the changing linguistic diversity into perspective, at the time when the authors estimated humanity used about 5,000 languages, the world’s population was only around 6 million, while today’s 7,500 languages are used among a global population of more than 8 billion. The authors describe today’s languages as “the survivors of a massive and highly selective historical bottleneck.”

CONNECT THE DOTS

• Experts say global linguistic diversity continues to decline worldwide, as roughly half of today’s languages are now considered endangered and approximately four languages are completely lost each year (around 1 in 10 living languages have fewer than 10 remaining speakers and are likely to die out soon). Researchers predict as many as 1,500 languages could be lost by the end of the century as global linguistic diversity continues to plummet.