Study uncovers lost ‘golden age’ of languages | Yale News

Skip to main content

Search YaleNews

Sort by

Close

Search

Share

Close

Share this page

Post to Facebook

Post to Twitter

Post to LinkedIn

Email this page

Print this page

Listen to this story<br>Study uncovers lost ‘golden age’ of languages

0:00<br>0:00

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.<br>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.<br>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.

Claire Bowern

Photo by Mara Lavitt

“In a way, language is ephemeral — a spoken sentence disappears into sound waves — and, yet, our work demonstrates that we can use patterns in language to reconstruct large demographic events over the course of millennia,” said Bowern, a professor of linguistics in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and coauthor of the study. “We show that language isn’t isolated from political currents and that this dynamic has been a facet of human history for much longer than previously thought.<br>“This finding is important for the many endangered languages of today because political currents don’t have to move in one direction. It’s not inevitable that endangered languages become extinct.”<br>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.

Map of currently spoken and signed languages of the world, colored by endangerment status.

Image courtesy of researcher.

[P]olitical currents don’t have to move in one direction. It’s not inevitable that endangered languages become extinct.

Claire Bowern

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.<br>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’s linguistic ‘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 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.”<br>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.<br>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.”

The...