If you think the world's 7,500 languages sounds like a lot, a new study argues we may be living in the linguistic leftovers. Researchers writing in Science estimate that between 20,000 and 75,000 languages were spoken during a "golden age" of linguistic diversity roughly 3,000 years ago, with global variety peaking between 1000 BCE and 1000 CE. Using computational models, population data, and ethnographic records to reconstruct the last 12,000 years, they suggest language counts—between 4,500 and 6,200 at the end of the last Ice Age, per Yale News—swelled after the rise of agriculture, then dropped as expanding states and empires spread a smaller set of dominant tongues, overtaking many languages and cultures.
"Until just a few thousand years ago, humanity inhabited a vastly more diverse cultural world than the one we know today," lead study author Damian Blasi tells Reuters. Today, at least four languages disappear each year, and as many as 1,500 more could vanish by 2100, Smithsonian reports. Indeed, half of all languages now spoken are considered endangered. While native languages were suppressed during the colonial era, the authors argue that political expansion was shrinking humanity's linguistic palette long before European colonialism. As Blasi tells Scientific American, it "takes much less than a colonial powerhouse to destroy linguistic diversity." Researchers add that surviving languages aren't necessarily better, just those that passed through a "highly selective historical bottleneck."
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