Ancient empires wiped out languages long before colonial era
Blasi DE, Hamilton MJ, Gray RD, Bowern CL
Ethnobotany
This study is about human linguistic history and has no connection to plants, gardening, or botany.
Scientists used mathematical models and historical population data to track how many languages existed on Earth at different points in history. They found that language diversity peaked thousands of years ago and then crashed as large empires spread their languages, diseases, and cultures across conquered peoples, long before modern colonialism began.
Key Findings
Before agriculture, an estimated 4,500 to 6,000 languages existed worldwide, compared to about 7,500 today
Global linguistic diversity peaked at tens of thousands of languages between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago
Major language extinction began with the spread of multinational empires, not recent colonial expansion
chevron_right Technical Summary
Researchers modeled the rise and fall of human languages over 10,000 years, finding a 'golden age' of tens of thousands of languages 1,000-3,000 years ago before empires and disease drove massive language extinction long before European colonization.
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Original paper
The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene.
Characterizing the factors that have shaped linguistic diversity is fundamental for understanding human history, culture, and cognition. In this study, we combined statistical and social computatio...
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