Humanity’s ‘golden age’ of language may have occurred 2,000 years ago

People on our planet speak more than 7,000 languages, each a unique repository of knowledge, culture and history. But today’s linguistic diversity may only be a shadow of a time when humans spoke ten times as many languages.

For two millennia, from 1000 BCE to 1000 CE, our planet was a veritable Tower of Babel, according to a study published today in Science. During this brief “golden age,” as the authors put it, the number of languages ​​rose to several tens of thousands. Then a rapid decline occurred, perhaps due to the rise of hegemonic and multinational states such as the Roman Empire. “There is this linguistic and cultural diversity that is slowly developing,” says the paper’s lead author, Damián Blasi, who studies language evolution at Harvard University. “At some point, some of these [languages] explode and they erase everything around them.

Because most ancient languages ​​left no trace, Blasi and his team reconstructed their history indirectly. The researchers began with the beginning of the Holocene, 12,000 years ago, when, according to expert estimates, the world’s population was between four and seven million. Assuming that hunter-gatherer groups were about the same size then as they are today and that each group spoke its own language, there were probably between 5,000 and 6,000 languages ​​in the world.

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To trace the path of linguistic diversity from that moment to today, Blasi’s team computationally modeled thousands of possible trajectories. A clear pattern emerged across the different models: as agriculture allowed the world to support more people, the number of languages ​​increased steadily, reaching a peak between 20,000 and 75,000 about 2,000 years ago before entering a decline that continues today: every few weeks, a language follows its last speaker to the grave.

Although the current rate of language disappearance is often attributed to the last 500 years of colonial expansion, which often sought to eliminate indigenous languages ​​altogether, this study suggests that early large-scale societies had a similar homogenizing effect. “It takes much less than a colonial power to destroy linguistic diversity,” Blasi says.

Linguists tend to assume that the languages ​​we speak today reflect the sounds and grammatical structures that the human brain or body can accept. But if our sample is limited to a fragment of what once existed, Blasi says, who knows how many linguistic possibilities we’re missing? “I think this hints at a potentially much richer and more exotic language phenotype,” he says.

However, not everyone buys into the “golden age” scenario. Lyle Campbell, a linguist at the University of Hawaii who was not involved in the study, says Blasi’s team “is grappling with elements of the distant past that are difficult to get a solid purchase on.” Many variables, such as the size of ancient ethnolinguistic groups and how agriculture influenced them, are impossible to establish with certainty. While this research “might even be on the right track,” Campbell says, it is “highly speculative.”

Assuming that legions of languages ​​coexist, it is also unclear whether neighboring languages ​​would have been truly distinct. Johanna Nichols, a linguist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, who was also not involved in the new paper, says that as so many small communities collided with each other, their speech may have morphed into an amorphous network of mutually intelligible dialects. “In a world with few people and [language] varieties that overlap and mix,” she says, “it’s just a big continuum. »