Farming spurred a global language boom that later waned
TL;DR Summary
A new analysis suggests there were thousands of languages 12,000 years ago (roughly 3,300–7,800), language diversity rose as farming spread, peaking around 2,000 years ago with tens of thousands of languages, and then declined—indicating that language extinction is not solely a modern phenomenon.
- Humanity spoke thousands of languages at the dawn of farming — now many of them are lost Nature
- Humans may have spoken 10 times as many languages 2,000 years ago Scientific American
- The golden age of language was a few thousand years ago Science News
- The collapse of the ‘Tower of Babel’: Humans have lost thousands of languages since antiquity EL PAÍS English
- Exploring the lost golden age of language diversity before expanding empires drove a global decline Phys.org
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