Humans may have spoken thousands more languages three millennia ago

Humans currently speak approximately 7,500 languages for communication, ranging from widely spoken Mandarin to rare Indigenous languages.

But a new study published in the journal Science reveals that global linguistic diversity was once far greater, with early humans speaking up to 75,000 distinct languages during a lost “golden age”.

Because ancient languages often disappeared without leaving written records, an international team of researchers relied on advanced computational models, global population estimates, and ethnographic data to trace linguistic history over the past 12,000 years.

Their modeling revealed a fascinating timeline. Around 12,000 years ago, before the agricultural revolution took root, the human population was deemed small, with between 4,500 and 6,200 languages spoken.

However, as humans domesticated plants and animals, the global population ballooned. This demographic explosion triggered a parallel surge in the creation of languages.

The researchers estimate that linguistic diversity peaked between 1000 B.C.E. and 1000 C.E., with the number of distinct tongues ranging from 20,000 to 75,000.

Unfortunately, this immense linguistic abundance did not last. The researchers suggest that the expansion of early multinational states, such as the Roman Empire, drove a massive global decline.

As these empires expanded, they assimilated smaller communities, spreading their dominant languages and cultures while wiping out regional dialects and the unique cultural traditions associated with them.

Yale University historical linguist Claire Bowern, a co-author of the study, expressed surprise at how recently this peak occurred.

The findings indicate that the devastating loss of global linguistic diversity began at least 1,000 years before modern European colonialism.

Today, that downward trend continues to accelerate. At least four languages die out every year, and experts predict that up to 1,500 known languages could vanish before the end of this century.

Lead author Damián Blasi, an anthropologist at Harvard University, explained that the languages that survive today are not inherently superior or more efficient. Instead, they are simply the lucky survivors of a “massive and highly selective historical bottleneck”.

While modern languages still feature an extensive collection of unique grammatical structures, tonal shifts, and click sounds, geneticists marvel at what unimaginable linguistic traits might have been permanently lost to extinction.

However, some outside experts, such as University of Hawai’i linguist Lyle Campbell, caution that the research remains “highly speculative” because reconstructing the unrecorded remote past is incredibly difficult.