Ancient Humans Likely Spoke 10x More Languages Than Today

Our planet currently supports more than 7,000 languages, each acting as a unique storehouse of culture and history. Yet the linguistic diversity we see today may represent only a fraction of what once existed. A new study published in Science suggests that during a 2,000-year window from 1000 B.C.E. to C.E. 1000, humans conversed in tens of thousands of tongues, creating a “golden age” of communication before a sharp decline.

Researchers reconstructed this ancient history using computational modeling. They started with the beginning of the Holocene 12,000 years ago, when global population estimates range from four to seven million. Assuming hunter-gatherer groups spoke distinct languages, the team calculated that there were likely 5,000 to 6,000 languages at that time.

As agriculture expanded, population sizes grew. This allowed for more communities and more distinct speech patterns. The models show a steady rise in language numbers, peaking between 20,000 and 75,000 tongues roughly 2,000 years ago. After this peak, a rapid decline began that continues today, with a language dying out every few weeks.

The study challenges the idea that the last 500 years of colonialism were the primary cause of language loss. Instead, it points to large, centralized societies like the Roman Empire as early drivers of linguistic homogenization. The researchers found that it takes much less than a colonial powerhouse to destroy this diversity, as a few dominant languages can overwhelm their neighbors.

By focusing only on modern languages, linguists may miss a broader range of human speech. The study suggests we might be overlooking a “richer and more exotic phenotype of language” that existed in the past. If our current sample is limited, who knows how many structural possibilities we are not seeing.

Questions Remain About the Past

Not all experts agree with the “golden age” scenario. Damián Blasi, the lead author and a language evolution researcher at Harvard University, acknowledges the difficulty of studying the remote past. His team is grappling with variables that are hard to pin down, such as the exact size of ancient ethnolinguistic groups.

Lyle Campbell, a linguist at the University of Hawaii who was not involved in the study, calls the research “highly speculative.” He notes that it is difficult to establish a solid purchase on these ancient data points. Even if the numbers are accurate, the nature of those languages is still debated.

Johanna Nichols, a linguistics professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that so many small communities living close together would have created a continuous spread of dialects rather than isolated languages. In her view, the world would have been a “big continuum” of speech rather than a collection of distinct, isolated tongues.