Science
Exploring the lost golden age of language diversity before expanding empires drove a global decline
Key Points
Today, people speak or sign around 7,500 languages. Yet this figure provides only a snapshot of a constantly changing history. How many languages existed before written records?
Today, people speak or sign around 7,500 languages. Yet this figure provides only a snapshot of a constantly changing history. How many languages existed before written records? Did agriculture reduce linguistic diversity by allowing expanding farming populations to replace smaller hunter-gatherer groups? Or did population growth initially create more opportunities for new languages to emerge?