Editor’s summary
More than four languages are lost every year, and this rate is predicted to increase. Blasi et al. investigated how language diversity has changed over the Holocene using a Bayesian modeling approach, ethnographic data, and estimates of the total human population size over time. They assumed a maximum size of ethnolinguistic groups and that the number of different ethnolinguistic groups is related to the number of languages. Their findings suggested that language loss is not a new phenomenon, and that language diversity has been decreasing rapidly over the past one to three millennia following a peak of an order of magnitude higher diversity than we see today. —Bianca Lopez
Abstract
Characterizing the factors that have shaped linguistic diversity is fundamental for understanding human history, culture, and cognition. In this study, we combined statistical and social computational modeling, ethnographic data, and paleodemographic inference to model trajectories of global linguistic diversity. Before the onset of plant and animal domestication, the number of languages was smaller than it is today (4500 to 6000 compared with 7500). Subsequent increases in global population precipitated increased linguistic diversity. We uncovered a linguistic “golden age” with tens of thousands of languages 3000 to 1000 years ago. Great loss of linguistic diversity did not begin with recent colonial expansion but as multinational empires first spread along with their languages, pathogens, and cultures. Thus, extinction has likely played a much greater role in shaping linguistic and cultural diversity than previously thought.
