Thousands of Languages Vanished Since Golden Age

Researchers have estimated that humankind, around the first millennium BC to the first millennium AD, may have spoken between 30,000 and over 75,000 different languages.

This period is considered a linguistic golden age, a stark contrast to the roughly 7,500 languages spoken globally today. The significant decline is attributed to historical factors, including the expansion of large empires and, more recently, European colonialism.

Mathematical modeling, combined with insights from anthropology, linguistics, and demography, allowed scientists to reconstruct historical language numbers. Early humans, dispersed as nomadic hunter-gatherers around 12,000 years ago, are thought to have spoken approximately 4,500 to 6,200 languages.

As populations grew and agriculture emerged, leading to more sedentary communities, the number of languages initially expanded. However, the rise of powerful empires and subsequent colonial practices, such as the suppression of indigenous tongues in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, led to widespread language replacement and disappearance.

Even today, linguistic diversity remains threatened, with approximately half of the world's languages considered endangered. This means that a vast majority of the global population speaks only a small fraction of the world's total languages.