The Linguistic Golden Age

The most notable findings of the study are that the number of languages in the world was already starting to decline five hundred years before the Columbian exchange and the Renaissance, and that small pre-agricultural populations placed an effective limit on the number of languages spoken in the pre-Holocene era. The peak number of languages was on the order of 10,000 to 35,000 according to the study under various model assumptions.

A linguistic “golden age” flourished between 1,000 to 3,000 years ago when tens of thousands of languages were spoken throughout the world, according to a new study coauthored by Yale linguist Claire Bowern that traces trajectories in global language diversity over the past 12,000 years.

The golden age was followed by a period of rapid decline in linguistic diversity that coincided with the rise of large states and multinational empires, such as the Roman Empire, the researchers found. The finding challenges a commonly held view that widespread language extinction began later, about 500 years ago, with the onset of European colonial expansion.

The languages of expanding states and empires were disproportionately likely to survive while those of absorbed, displaced, or declining populations disappeared, the researchers concluded. This means that the roughly 7,600 languages spoken or signed today represent a small and historically biased sample of the languages that once existed, which has important implications for the study of global patterns in language and culture, they said. . . .

The study, which was published July 23 in the journal Science, is the result of a long international collaboration between experts in language, demography, and evolutionary biology. . . .

Direct evidence of languages doesn’t exist before the appearance of writing about 6,000 years ago. So for the study, the researchers combined ethnographic information, estimates of prehistoric population size, and statistical and social-computational modelling to estimate linguistic diversity over the course of the Holocene — the current geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago.

To gauge the likely distribution and sizes of populations before the advent of agriculture, the researchers used ethnographic data from 171 hunter-gatherer and fisher societies whose traditional subsistence and mobility had not been profoundly transformed by contact with food-producing populations. They combined these estimates with independent analyses suggesting that the global human population 12,000 years ago was between approximately 4.4 and 7 million. Assuming that the number of languages in the early Holocene corresponded with the number of distinct groups that the total human population could accommodate at the time, between 4,500 and 6,200 languages were spoken 12,000 years ago, the study’s models estimated.

The world immediately before agriculture was probably not exceptionally rich in languages,” said lead author Damián Blasi, an ICREA (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) research professor based at the Center for Brain & Cognition at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. “There were most likely fewer languages than there are today. Linguistic diversity then grew alongside the human population for thousands of years.”

To capture fluctuations in linguistic diversity as populations expanded dramatically following the onset of agriculture and technological innovation and then contracted through wars, plagues, and other ecological factors, the researchers modelled thousands of possible trajectories connecting language estimates at the beginning of the Holocene with the present.

The models consistently produced patterns indicating that language diversity peaked between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago when upwards of tens of thousands of languages were being spoken worldwide, this period that the researchers call the world’s linguistic “golden age.”

That golden age ended with the rise of states and multinational empires as the dominant groups spread their languages, cultures, and pathogens to previously independent populations, the study shows. European colonialism intensified the steep decline in linguistic diversity, but did not cause it, according to the study.

The loss of so much linguistic diversity over the course of two millennia affected the development of today’s languages, the researchers said.

“The languages we see today are the survivors of a massive and highly selective historical bottleneck,” said study coauthor Russell Gray, director of the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “A linguistic feature may be common not because it is inherently efficient or better for communication, but because it happened to be carried by populations that expanded. Extinction may have shaped linguistic diversity much more profoundly than we previously appreciated.”

"Study uncovers lost ‘golden age’ of languages: A new study coauthored by Yale linguist Claire Bowern suggests that tens of thousands of languages were spoken between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago." via a Yale University press release.

Conventional linguistic reconstruction methods struggle to reconstruction linguistic pre-history much before 4,000 to 8,000 years ago.

The 7,600 languages spoken today is rapidly falling. A very large share of all languages spoken today have a small number of speakers or are moribund and on the brink of extinction in the next couple of generations or sooner. 

The general consensus is that between 6,000 and 7,000 languages are currently spoken. Some linguists estimate that between 50% and 90% of them will be severely endangered or dead by the year 2100. The 20 most common languages, each with more than 50 million speakers, are spoken by 50% of the world's population, but most languages are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people. . . . More than 50% of the world's endangered languages are located in just eight countries: India, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea and Cameroon.

From Wikipedia. About 107 languages are spoken by 7 million people or more. A list of the number of languages per country can be found here. The median Native American language in the U.S. has 12 speakers. The median Australian Aboriginal language has 10 speakers. the median Brazilian indigenous language has 210 speakers. The median Papuan language has 1,315 speakers. The median Indonesian language has 3,500 speakers.

Reviving an extinct or endangered or purely liturgical language is not impossible but is very difficult and there have been only about twenty moderately successful attempts to do so. The most successful effort has been the Hebrew language.