There was a golden age of language roughly 1,000 to 3,000 years ago when humanity spoke thousands of languages. Tens of thousands of languages, actually. They all coexisted across the planet. And then European colonization ramped up, and they started gobbling cultures whole, effectively killing off all of these unique local languages, many of them eventually fading into the annals of time, according to a new study published in Science.
It was a linguistic mass extinction.
The researchers estimate that around 12,000 years ago, humans spoke between 4,500 and 6,200 languages. As populations expanded, communities split off and created new ones, and more new ones and more new ones, eventually leading to a now-forgotten golden age when tens of thousands of languages flourished across the globe. Then the age of empires came, when large states absorbed smaller societies and replaced their local languages with whatever the colonists spoke – English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, etc.
Humanity Once Spoke Tens of Thousands of Languages, New Study Suggests
the researchers say that the collapse seemed to have started before European colonial powers started circling the globe, forcefully altering cultures and languages wherever they went, but it really ramped up when colonialism became de rigueur, as these new colonial governments would outlaw indigenous languages and then redraw borders through native communities, coming up with all sorts of incentives that encouraged people to abandon their cultures and accept their new European-centric way of life.
Today, only about 7,500 languages remain, and roughly 3,300 are endangered. More than 400 disappeared in just the last half-century.
There is some good news, however: languages around today will be much harder to lose, as, on top of revitalization and preservation efforts, people are now regularly in the habit of recording themselves, inadvertently preserving languages for generations to come.
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