Christine Drews Sieger
Human linguistic diversity peaked in the millennia following the agricultural revolution, only to be crushed by expanding empires, colonialism, and modern language extinction.
While thousands of active languages are spoken across the globe today, our modern linguistic landscape is merely a shadow of its historical peak.
New research published in Science reveals that global language diversity hit an all-time high in the millennia following the last Ice Age.
In the millennia following the agricultural revolution and before the rise of the first major empires, scientists estimate that people spoke between 30,000 and 75,000 different languages worldwide.
“Languages are meaningful to their communities. They carry knowledge, associations and memories,” explained Claire Bowern, a professor of linguistics and anthropology at Yale University and a leader of the study to Reuters.
She added that for researchers, these ancient tongues offer critical insights into where populations lived, what they ate, and how they thought.
Rethinking the past
To map out these historic figures, scientists created clever simulation models. They drew on demographic data, historical trends, and details from 171 modern hunter-gatherer societies across Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia.
“We rarely appreciate that, until just a few thousand years ago, humanity inhabited a vastly more diverse cultural world than the one we know today,” said study lead author Damian Blasi, a cognitive scientist and evolutionary anthropologist at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Spain.
Around 12,000 years ago, small nomadic hunter-gatherer bands spoke roughly 4,500 to 6,200 languages. As farming developed, human populations boomed and communities settled in isolated regions, causing language creation to explode into tens of thousands of local dialects and tongues, according to Reuters.
Empires and extinction
That golden age ended as global power shifted. The rise of sprawling ancient empires—from Mesopotamia to Rome—and later centuries of European colonialism wiped out thousands of unique local tongues.
Dominant powers often forced conquered groups to abandon their native speech, while other languages slowly faded as communities adopted common trade words.
While some ancient tongues didn’t vanish—such as Latin, which gradually branched off into modern Romance languages—others across ancient Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean faded away entirely without leaving behind descendants.
Today, that steep decline continues without stopping. About half of all remaining global languages are currently deemed endangered.
Bowern noted that “90% of the world’s population speaks 10% of the world’s languages, so there are many, many languages with small numbers of speakers and signers,” according to Reuters.
