Yale Researchers Suggest Humans Spoke Tens of Thousands of Languages 1,000 to 3,000 Years Ago
A new study led by Yale University historical linguist Claire Bowern and evolutionary anthropologist Damián Blasi indicates that linguistic diversity reached a peak between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago, with potentially tens of thousands of languages spoken globally. This research challenges the notion of a steady decline in linguistic diversity since the last Ice Age. The team utilized demographic data and computer modeling, starting with ethnographic data from 171 present-day hunter-gatherer and fishing societies, to estimate the number of ethnolinguistic communities around 12,000 years ago. Their model suggests that approximately 4,500 to 6,200 languages existed at the beginning of the Holocene. As populations grew and agriculture transformed societies, language diversity increased, allowing smaller groups to form distinct identities and new languages. The decline in linguistic diversity began roughly 2,000 years ago, predating European colonial expansion, and is attributed to the growth of large states an... 
