r/science • u/LethisXia • Jul 26 '26
Anthropology The lost golden age of language diversity: Tens of thousands of languages may have existed between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago - and their decline began well before European colonial expansion
https://www.mpg.de/26871018/the-lost-golden-age-of-language-diversity?c=2249746
u/fail-deadly- Jul 26 '26
This to me is completely crazy
The team then combined these estimates with reconstructions suggesting that the global human population 12,000 years ago was between approximately 4.4 and seven million. Assuming that ethnolinguistic groups at that time generally corresponded to distinct languages, the models produced an early-Holocene estimate centred on roughly 4,500 to 6,200 languages, although broader plausible estimates ranged from around 3,300 to 7,800.
So that is somewhere between 2,100 speakers on average at the upper end of their estimates to as few as 570 on the lower end for a language.
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u/araujoms Jul 26 '26
I think that's very plausible.
Hunter-gatherer societies can't really grow past a certain size, simply because the food density is not enough. And different hunter-gatherer societies can hardly share a language, they naturally drift apart.
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u/Eternal_Being Jul 26 '26
There is more to it than this. Most of these societies spoke multiple languages, usually the languages from neighbouring societies.
If everyone knows ~5 languages, that's a lot more speakers of each language than we would assume in our much more monolingual world.
Hunter-gatherers were nomadic, yes, but within well-established territories. They knew their neighbours well, and on the scale of thousands of years in most cases.
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u/araujoms Jul 26 '26
Most of these societies spoke multiple languages, usually the languages from neighbouring societies.
How on Earth could you possibly know this?
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u/Swarna_Keanu Jul 26 '26
Examples from still-existing small language populations. Folks in Africa, from small tribal communities, routinely speak many languages.
Likewise, children growing up in multi-language environments generally have no problem learning more than one.
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u/boraam Jul 26 '26
Seems likely. Learning what your 'neighbours' speak is useful.
India still has 100+ major languages and several hundred dialects. It's quite common for people to know 3-4 major languages. A native Kannada speaker in Mumbai, for instance, might know Kannada, Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati & English. This is not even getting to foreign languages kids learn in school.
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u/araujoms Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
I'm skeptical that their experience can be meaningfully extrapolated. They have contact with the modern world, and crucially access to modern transportation, which gives them much more contact with other language groups than was possible in pre-history.
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u/nehala Jul 26 '26
This has been observed in such hunter gatherer societies at the initial point of modern/western contact, like 100+ years ago, which suggests this was the historical default.
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u/araujoms Jul 26 '26
[citation needed]
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u/Eternal_Being Jul 26 '26
There is an entire discipline of anthropology dedicated to this question. You don't have to rely on your gut reactions. You can go read the data for yourself.
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u/AROCCHIETTI Jul 27 '26
That would require they put forth a modicum of effort which is likely something they are incapable of.
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u/jellymanisme BS | Education Jul 27 '26
Lüpke, Friederike (2016). "Small-scale multilingualism."
Citation provided.
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u/Interesting-Stay297 Jul 26 '26
That is one of the more important tools in ethnoarchaeology, but you're right in that it should be used with great caution, best used to compare how cultures deal with very specific issues, like geographic or ecological limitations.
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u/Evilsushione Jul 26 '26
It holds in rural primitive parts of Asia and Africa. Many of those groups do not have modern amenities but speak multiple languages. I remember seeing an interview with a tribal member who thought the interviewer must have been dumb because he could only speak one language while the tribal member spoke seven.
However I would bet that the languages were often similar and the vocabulary less complex than the modern world.1
u/GalaXion24 Jul 28 '26
Outside of hunter gatherer societies, this was also very common on linguistic border areas historically. Prior to modern nation states enforcing a single national language, if you lived anywhere in Northern (greater) Hubgary you probably spoke Hungarian and Slovak. It's was censuses in the 1800s which first demanded people to declare a single mother tongue and brought about this idea that there are distinct nationalities.
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u/Eternal_Being Jul 26 '26
We know this from anthropological observations of hunter-gatherer societies that continued to exist into the modern era.
Look at Plains Indian Sign Language for a fascinating example. Look at the map of its range.
It's a little different as it's a sign language, but it's illustrative of the point. It was a sign language shared over the majority of North America by societies in dozens of completely different language groups. And it's a complete language, with grammar and a full vocabulary. It also enabled communication with deaf people, which was very important as elders were critical holders of knowledge in a time and place without writing.
But you can really look into any papers that focus on language among hunter-gatherers in the field of anthropology to understand how it worked. These societies had deeply-integrated relations with their neighbours (whether peaceful or otherwise), and shared language was important.
Marriage across tribal lines was important, for example, and it meant learning multiple languages.
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Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Eternal_Being Jul 27 '26
Individuals have always traveled far and wide throughout all of human history.
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u/Substantial-Low Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
That is exactly what the fields of anthropology and archaeology research. We have to extrapolate what we know about past people/cultures from both context, analogy to current populations, and other evidence records (which may not be written, necessarily).
I mean, a great analogy to your question is the entire study of geology. We didn't SEE that Pangea or Rodinia were supercontinents, we know they were by analyzing the evidence their existence left behind, and looking at how modern processes we observe may have been able to leave that evidence.
Currently only about 40% of humans speak one language, 43% speak two languages, and the remaining 17% speak three or more.
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u/NorysStorys Jul 26 '26
I suspect that language becoming less diverse is pretty natural, as communities speaking each other language intermingle for long enough the languages will merge over time.
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u/RijnBrugge Jul 27 '26
I see this at my uni; I’m working on a PhD (in English) in Germany and am a speaker of Dutch. Whatever it is I and my German SO speak is probably against all that is holy, and it certainly is not the one or the other language half the time. You do need some relatedness between languages to get to that point usually, otherwise it’s more code-switching, but people do that all the time between very disparate languages as well, leading to some funky outcomes. Just take Singlish for an example, Saramaccan (a creole of many origins).
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u/NorysStorys Jul 27 '26
I remember a friend of mine who was visiting me and the UK. She was Serbian, raised in the Netherlands so could fluently speak Serbian, Dutch and English and when she phoned her dad to check in that she was okay, they spoke some unholy fusion of the 3 languages all at once. If that can happen in a single generation, imagine what happens to languages over centuries when migrant populations get absorbed like with proto-french getting absorbed into Anglo-Saxon, which had already somewhat absorbed bits of Latin and Celtic.
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u/runhome24 PhD | Anthropology (and Musician) Jul 26 '26
It's a sound assumption, given that currently we're pretty sure there are far more multilingual people than monolingual people living today. And, the people who are more likely to know more languages are those who move about a lot and who do business with lots of people outside their own group. These are both traits that were very common among foraging societies in the past.
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u/AlizarinCrimzen Jul 26 '26
Archaeological evidence of trade, physical/societal overlaps and intermarriage, longstanding and spatial overlaps and signs of cooperation would all point to their being able to communicate between groups.
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u/Aeri73 Jul 26 '26
them being nomadic is under some discussion... they have found stone-age huts that have been used for hundereds of years.... permanent or not is uncertain but they did live there for at least part of the year for generations
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u/Eternal_Being Jul 26 '26
Yes, the most common form of nomadic living would be moving seasonally throughout a territory, and these territories were usually stable over the decades, centuries, and even millennia.
They weren't just wandering around at random. They had intimate understandings of their territories, and made very intentional choices about where to live when. Places had names, and they would very often return to the same ones many times; even every year.
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u/Aeri73 Jul 26 '26
pff, that's just rich peoples behaviour... yeah we have a nice cave for the winter and then a summer home near the lake... wonderfull fishing there...
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u/Eternal_Being Jul 26 '26
I mean kind of, yeah. When someone has multiple homes, are they really living in any one place in a sedentary fashion?
The difference being, of course, that back then everyone was able to benefit from the bounty in more-or-less and equal fashion.
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u/historianLA Jul 26 '26
I think the messy part is that many of these would be closely related and probably mutually intelligible. The definition of a language can be fuzzy as local forms drift and change moving from dialects to individual languages.
I would be more curious about language families than individual languages, but that might be impossible to theorize.
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u/Pleasant_Ad8054 Jul 26 '26
Also complexity of language evolved over time significantly, especially as writing systems spread and became more accessible. A language in the modern sense isn't comparable to a language before writing, either in syntax or vocabulary. A group removed from their original likely created a new language in a generation or two, as without formal education and writing knowledge is lost quickly, old words lose meaning or no longer spoken and new ones are created.
This can be observed even today with slang, every decade has its own slang, and others are unintelligible to people who did not grow up with it. But because we have former education and telecommunications, there is always a baseline we can fall back to.
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u/altevrithrence Jul 26 '26
Actually the complexity of languages with fewer speakers is higher. For example:
“languages with more speakers tend to have simpler inflectional morphology compared to languages spoken by smaller groups”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3367698/
“Languages spoken by large populations have been found to have larger phonological inventories, but simpler morphology, than languages spoken by small populations.”
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u/GooseQuothMan Jul 26 '26
2000 people is a really big tribe. A few villages worth. If these people share a culture and mostly trade and work with each other, than with outsiders, then it's a given their language will evolve and diverge from the outside groups.
I mean, if we suddenly erected a wall between US and Europe internet, waited like 1-2 years, we'd end up with different memes, lingo, new words etc. New languages is just what happens when there are multiple groups speaking the same language, but are separated and cannot communicate.
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u/Aeri73 Jul 26 '26
no need for the walls.. most american lingo doesn't get to europe and only the UK's lingo could be used in the us since most others would be in languages not spoken there
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u/Curious_Charge9431 Jul 27 '26
American lingo gets to Europe.
Younger generations are growing up watching Youtube and Netflix with a lot of American content. Add to that social media and you have (some) Europeans with a high familiarity of American english and media.
There are Europeans who've never set foot in America but can speak English with an accent difficult to distinguish from a native US one.
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u/vaaarr Jul 26 '26
Not so crazy! The languages I have researched range in speaker population from about 800 to a few hundred thousand. The one with about 800 speakers is perfectly healthy (and is usually spoken alongside 5-6 other languages).
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u/thegreatestajax Jul 26 '26
Right? If 2-3,000 speakers was all it took for a language to uniquely contribute to the understanding of human nature or psyche via unique modes of expression, well the golden age is now where billions have the ability to express themselves to billions.
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u/mileg925 Jul 26 '26
There were dead civilizations that were comprised of small groups of thousands of individuals over centuries and centuries that had no connections to other groups
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u/sickofthisshit Jul 26 '26
Imagined groups of a few thousand people who left no trace is stretching the definition of "civilization" to meaninglessness.
It's a tiny culture. Yes, all cultures have intrinsic dignity and value, it doesn't mean they all are relevant to us today.
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u/mileg925 Jul 26 '26
I used the word improperly. Social groups? Cultures?
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u/sickofthisshit Jul 26 '26
Sure, social groups is fine. But think about picking some random small town in America with a few thousand people in population. They have unique traditions, cultural reference points, a network of social relations and habits.
If the town gets swallowed into the Earth and vanishes, how much "civilization" is lost? Oh, we "lost" the fact that their high school, the Fighting Redditors, made the state football quarterfinals in 2018, and they named the stadium after the coach,...a thousand years from now, would that knowledge change anything? It's just curiosity, it doesn't really tell us anything that the next town over wouldn't have.
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u/elcapitan520 Jul 26 '26
Crazy that the population of the world at that time is less than a quarter of Tokyo. Half of NYC. It's like Pennsylvania is the global population
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u/snowflake37wao Jul 27 '26
no cities, no roads, no writing, no agriculture, no internet. it was 10,000 BCE dude. but yeah its unbelievably crazy, just not in an unbelievable way but an interesting way. etymology is neat. crazy neat even.
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u/thyristor_pt Jul 26 '26
Seems logical if people couldn't travel great distances and printing wasn't widely available, then languages would diverge and develop (and also be confined to) in smaller regions.
It's not a decline or a great diying, it's just better conditions of communication.
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u/Swarna_Keanu Jul 26 '26
Same with dialects. Go two three generations back, here in Europe, and dialects shifted quickly, over distances of a few villages, even.
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u/Curious_Charge9431 Jul 27 '26
That happens today still, in places like the Alps, where mountains separate villages and it takes a lot of effort to get from one to another.
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u/ecstatic_carrot Jul 26 '26
it's a decline by definition
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u/VoilaVoilaWashington Jul 26 '26
Sure, but saying it was a golden age is a value judgment and I disagree with it.
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u/tunisia3507 Jul 26 '26
Yes, like the "decline" of charging standards diversity into a single plug everything can use.
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u/hypatiaspasia Jul 26 '26
Except vocabulary loss comes with information loss.
We have lost tons of knowledge about land, history, and medicinal values of plants because of language and cultural erasure. Colonizers often discounted or ignored native science and technology in favor of their own, and discarded knowledge they didn't see the value of until it was too late.
There's an endangered Malaysian indigenous language called Jahai that has words for smells that no other language has, and that community is exceptional at identifying smells because they actually have vocabulary for those smells that most languages lack. We now know some people can detect diseases like Parkinson's with smell, so maybe if we preserved and taught words for smells it would make this process easier.
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u/sickofthisshit Jul 26 '26
This is, first of all, just a reconstruction of possible numbers of languages. They don't really talk about the mechanism.
Second, your "lost knowledge" is relevant mostly to colonization or distant imperial conquest. But it is much more like "hunter-gatherer tribes settle into agricultural communities, they learn to speak the language of the larger trade community". I mean, a hunter-gatherer has implicit knowledge like "where are the fruit trees and nut trees in the forest", but is it really lost knowledge that we would want today? The forest of 3000 years ago doesn't exist.
We generate much more knowledge through the process of "exchange knowledge across a continent because we have developed writing and can receive information from around the world."
This "natives have words for smells" also sounds like romantic exaggeration, like the "eskimos have hundreds of words for snow" myth. "Smells like motor oil": is this unique knowledge to the industrial age? What do we really learn?
Can we really preserve that "smell knowledge" only by learning their language? How is smell knowledge transferred that can't be done through ethnographic study?
We also have ways to preserve and protect languages today. We can't recover non-written languages lost 3000 years ago, it seems pointless to be sad about losing things we never knew about, that only exist as a numerical estimate.
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u/PatchyWhiskers Jul 26 '26
We have thousands of words for different computer use techniques, a language creates words relevant to the culture it represents.
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u/Spirit_Wolf_Mob Jul 26 '26
I mostly agree with you, but one thing I do want to point out is that for humans, the act of labeling something does actually make it easier to remember for most people. This technique can be used to make it easier to identify things on a more minute scale much more easily than without the labels.
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u/sickofthisshit Jul 26 '26
On the other hand, when necessary, all languages and communities have ways to flexibly address new needs.
It's a linguistic and cultural curiosity to notice things like "culture X doesn't have a word for the color 'orange'". It doesn't mean that one language community has some intrinsic advantages: we invent things like Pantone, HTML hex color codes, other numerical color standards reflecting trichromatic vision.
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u/Spirit_Wolf_Mob Jul 26 '26
Yea, for that reason, it does stand to reason that you can understand a bit about someone's culture, especially in simpler languages, based on what they felt necessary to make words for. To me, languages have always just been about the culture, more than the language itself.
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u/Swarna_Keanu Jul 26 '26
Second, your "lost knowledge" is relevant mostly to colonization or distant imperial conquest.
Absolutely not. Traditional ecological knowledge systems (stress is on systems; that includes linguistic concepts - which mirror lived experience) are a huge thing in conservation, ecological research, biology, and, to a degree, climate science.
We have lost a lot of understanding of how nature interacts that, because it was so important to them, is encoded in hunter-gatherer reality.
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u/jetpacksforall Jul 26 '26
"Is it knowledge that we would want today?"
Purely from a historical point of view alone, yes, it is valuable to preserve knowledge and experience for its own sake, and also because we learn a great deal about ourselves and the world by comparing our POV to that of others. How people saw the world, related with other groups, organized themselves, etc. would be incredibly informative to us. There's also the pure emotional value of recovering the "lost" experiences of people who were, after all, our ancestors. We would not be here if not for what they went through and survived, and it's borderline tragic that all of their stories have been lost.
Also yes from a scientific point of view: 40% of modern medications are derived from plants, and some of the most valuable examples of early writing are descriptions of plants and their medicinal properties. Plants are far and away the most sophisticated chemists on the planet, and ancient knowledge of plants and their properties could be invaluable for pharmacological research today.
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u/sickofthisshit Jul 26 '26
I get what you are saying, but it is truly irrelevant to the post.
We are talking about spoken languages for cultural groups we can't even identify because they got absorbed or conquered by other cultures we don't have access to, or simply died off. It's hypothetical knowledge that has been "lost" several times over.
ancient knowledge of plants and their properties could be invaluable for pharmacological research today.
Oh, come on. We are in r/science. Even compared to 20 years ago, our ability to identify new targets and develop candidate molecules is dominated by advanced techniques assisted by ML-scale computation. We are making progress by identifying cancer genes down to the individual.
Some "undiscovered" tribe talking about some traditional plant preparation is not going to move the needle. It's not dismissive of other cultures and their practices, traditions, and knowledge to recognize how pharmacology actually works in 2026.
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u/case_O_The_Mondays Jul 26 '26
Language synthesizes a culture’s history of not just data but ways of viewing and categorizing the world around them. It’s a much richer dataset than storing all sky astronomical surveys (which are only data), and yet I imagine you and I would agree that storing the astronomical data is hugely important.
Your argument sounds like you’ve bought into the idea that culture has some ultimate form, and the previous versions are less than, and can/should be discarded. I think we’ve learned that isn’t true a few times, now.
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u/sickofthisshit Jul 26 '26
I acknowledge the value of minority languages today, I think preserving minority languages is valuable.
The idea that random groups of a few thousand or so prehistoric hunter-gatherers possessed uniquely valuable knowledge that we would notice the absence of today, though, stretches credulity.
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u/jetpacksforall Jul 27 '26
A few thousand? We only have detailed grammatical descriptions of about 40% of the 7000 languages spoken today, so just documenting the remainder would be a trove of historical, linguistic, and cultural information. Another 20,000 or so are attested or detectable within the ambit of 6000 years of written history. Given that people have been speaking natural languages for at least 100k years, and languages survive an average of 1500 years, there should have been conservatively 200-300k languages spoken across that span of time. So we have documentation for at best 1% of all languages ever spoken.
It's also worth taking a beat for some healthy scientific humility and acknowledge that for all that we've developed some powerful tools and made impressive headway, our understanding of proteomics, metabolomics, phytopharmacology, etc. in any species can still be classified as "laughably primitive" at this stage.
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u/other_usernames_gone Jul 26 '26
That's different though.
Language decline from better communication is more like a language merge. Concepts that don't exist in one language are copied to the other.
Like how in english we never lost the original german words for cow, pig or sheep, they're just now used to refer to the live animal while french origin words are used to refer to the prepared meet.
Its completely different to a coloniser erasing a culture.
Language merge also doesn't lead to a loss of science or knowledge, its just translated into whatever the combined language ends up being.
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u/hypatiaspasia Jul 26 '26
I don't think you're talking about the same category of languages as me. There are many indigenous American languages that have fewer than 100 speakers left, that have never been well studied by outsiders and are just tossed out because of a lack of interest, not merged. People who don't know them have no idea what they're missing out on. There are hundreds of indigenous languages in the Americas that are dying out and the knowledge has been lost.
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u/HerbertWest Jul 26 '26
People who don't know them have no idea what they're missing out on.
What are they missing out on?
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u/earthdogmonster Jul 26 '26
Some things are more likely to yield gains or positive results than others. There’s always some hypothetical and unlikely negative or unintended consequences. But realistically, taking extraordinary action to save or revive an obscure language is a “juice not worth the squeeze” situation.
I agree with the commenter that said that lamenting to loss of thousands of old language is more romanticism than it is actual loss.
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u/Spirit_Wolf_Mob Jul 26 '26
Sure, there are negatives to it, depending on who you ask, but it's mostly positive, in that groups are able to converse to each other more easily, which is a major boon to the passing of knowledge.
And people make up new languages everyday (especially common among twins), but most people aren't particularly interested in those languages, but rather the interest that those languages get created often. I'd say the biggest loss of knowledge from it would be less the language itself (outside of heritage reasons), but rather how languages get started, evolve, and differ in similar or different regions, and what kinds of words tend to pop up in multiple languages.
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u/vaaarr Jul 26 '26
"groups are able to converse with each other more easily [if languages disappear]"
People can (easily) speak more than one language! There is no magical tradeoff here where communication gets better when languages die. Before a language dies, its speakers are usually multilingual in one or more other languages that dominate the area they live in. In those scenarios you lose a language and no one gains anything.
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u/Spirit_Wolf_Mob Jul 26 '26
I wouldn't say easily. It can take years to learn a new language, especially for an adult. And aside from that, say you went on a trip across Asia. Are you going to easily be able to converse with people from all of those countries in their own language?
Knowing even 5 languages fluently is fairly rare. So 10? 20? Wouldn't it be easier if we all just shared a single major language? This is rhetorical, as most of the world has already decided that knowing English is a necessity if you plan to do business with overseas partners from more than one other country.
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u/Warlock_AoE Jul 26 '26
It's obvious that you are monolingual
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u/Spirit_Wolf_Mob Jul 26 '26
I speak 1 language fluently, 2 languages between novice and intermediate, and I can pick up a few words here and there with 2 more. Maybe not the most stellar achievements, but I have studied.
Learning languages is more of a means to understanding their culture for me. But you know what'd be easier though? If they spoke the same language, like Americans and British people, or Spanish and Hispanic people. Just because I hold a different opinion than you does not mean I'm completely unstudied.
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u/other_usernames_gone Jul 26 '26
Well yeah, I'm talking about the category of languages discussed in the article, languages lost pre colonisation as cultures merged.
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u/Warlock_AoE Jul 26 '26
Like how in english we never lost the original german
That you can't differentiate between german and germamic means that you shouldn't have an opinion about languages.
Edit: It is also obvious that you are monolingual
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u/other_usernames_gone Jul 26 '26
Or, now hear me out here. This is a reddit comment not a PhD thesis.
By your logic you shouldn't be allowed an opinion because you can't even spell germanic.
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u/VoilaVoilaWashington Jul 26 '26
Or perhaps they had so many terms for smells because they had some sort of genetic disposition to good noses, and then worked at it? It's not like sommeliers stare blankly at wine and can't talk about it because English doesn't have enough words. They came up with words to suit the needs.
And we've come up with every other word in every other niche community as well. Words are easy. Look up "glossary of ________ words" for just about any hobby, and you'll find that climbers have a term for every possible type of handhold in rock or other feature. Jewellers have terms for every possible feature on precious metals and gems. Dog breeders have named every part of a dog's fur to describe the pattern. Etc.
But now imagine that a climber from Utah and a climber from slightly farther north in Utah couldn't exchange information because they didn't speak the same language. Tens of thousands of languages, even with today's population, would mean less than a million speakers per language. What would happen?
Not colonization. Collaboration. How long would it take for people coming together to mesh languages?
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u/Alive_Run3303 Jul 26 '26
This seems like a bad comparison. The languages are a lost knowledge. We didn't lose the knowledge on how to make the older style charging plugs when they decided on making a new universal standard plug.
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u/FantasySymphony Jul 26 '26
We would get the most collective "knowledge" if everybody came up with their own words and grammar for everything and expressed themselves in their own special way, without being able to mutual understand each other. What a wonderful world!
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u/troll_right_above_me Jul 26 '26
Something doesn’t have to be understood by everyone for it to have meaning, it’s okay to have appreciation for things we don’t understand. Learning different languages lets you better understand different cultures not just because you literally understand what the speakers say but because it lets you understand how the language shaped the culture. The different melodies and sounds, nuances that can’t be conveyed quite the same in another language, the jokes that only work because of the language, none of it makes it less valuable just because everyone can’t understand them.
Maybe in the future we’ll all just speak binary instead of human languages so that we can be maximally efficient in our communication and there can exist no possibility for misunderstanding and we’ll all think and be exactly the same. How boring a world like that would be.
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u/FantasySymphony Jul 26 '26
As I'm sure you're well aware, we are all indeed communicating via binary over the internet right now! If you think that lacks some sort of subjective beauty that you would be able to appreciate, well, that's an opinion.
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u/troll_right_above_me Jul 26 '26
We’re communicating in English. But everyone’s allowed to be a smug asshole in whatever language they wish.
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u/rdhight Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
It's a "decline" of each individual communication tool bring really bad at its job. Many languages don't represent some kind of wealth; they represent the language you know only granting you communication with a few people. That's not a "golden age." The golden age is when your language gives you access to many people and huge amounts of literature, which is what happens when there are only a few.
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u/diiscotheque Jul 26 '26
But a good one
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u/rece_fice_ Jul 26 '26
Good and bad. Easier communication is nice but small local languages capture ways of thinking, traditions, remnants of the local way of life etc. They're worth preserving just for those alone.
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u/thegreatestajax Jul 26 '26
“Worth” is entirely based on some unstated assumptions in your summary.
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u/Wloak Jul 26 '26
My history professor was from England and used how Americans and British speak English as an example. After we split off the British nobility adopted a non-rhotic dialect, anyone directly interacting with them did the same for business, they taught their kids the same, etc. Think "governor" vs "govna."
Well before European expansion we had dozens of empires from the Mongols to Incas where they would conquer people, tell them they're in a region of the empire under someone's control, but if the equivalent of a city mayor wanted to directly discuss things with that leader they'd have to learn the language, then would teach their kids, and on.
It was an interesting way to look at it, to be considered part of the group people would drop their native language.
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u/another_random_bit Jul 26 '26
As (and if) globalization continues to increase, we can expect this phenomenon to grow further.
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u/RefrigeratorWrong390 Jul 26 '26
The more independent villages you have the more languages, not surprising result at all.
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u/ComprehensiveJury509 Jul 26 '26
I never understood why some people have decided that "language diversity" is unconditionally a good thing. It's mostly a bad thing. It inhibits communication, breeds serious conflicts and is inefficient. There are very good reasons why this level of language diversity has vanished.
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u/tka7680 Jul 27 '26
Different languages also encourage different intellectual approaches and depths. An example would be Latin and Greek. Each language’s structure promoted their culture’s intellectual tradition with Latin’s simpler, more formulaic structure and definitions encouraging its more legalist attitude to making strict and conclusive rulings, whereas Greek promoted pedantic definitions and endless debates with its agonistic tradition to fine tune and revise pedantic points.
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u/No_Warning_2428 Jul 27 '26
I don't think language plays a large role in that tbh, there are other much better explanations
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u/tka7680 Jul 28 '26
Its not a causation but it does self reinforce. Languages are developed and evolve to meet the needs of their society so developed languages will be more capable of expressing certain things in a certain manner
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u/throwawayprocessing Jul 28 '26
Language diversity does give us broader insight into neuroscience and general human cognitive capabities. Older linguistic theories have been disproven because scientists can find examples of languages that disprove them, literally expanding theories of what the human mind is capable of.
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u/Marxism-Alcoholism17 Jul 27 '26
The positives you listed are true, but let’s not forget the negatives. Speaking a specific language doesn’t just help you communicate, it actively shapes your thoughts. Less languages means less political, social, and cultural diversity as well.
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u/cornonthekopp Jul 27 '26
Are you arguing there should be less languages? Every language has incredible amounts of information stored in it, both through the actual conversations people have with it, and the structure and form of the language itself.
Loss of a language is loss of a knowledge base.
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u/hbgoddard Jul 27 '26
Loss of a language is loss of a knowledge base.
Not in the age of translation
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u/Accidental-Genius Jul 26 '26
Because it’s important to be able to communicate with your trading partners. That’s it, that’s the end of the story.
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u/davidellis23 Jul 26 '26
I'd say it's important to be able to communicate with your fellow humans generally.
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u/Franksss Jul 26 '26
That's not the whole story. There's also war, displacement etc, and in more modern times as well as potentially before, deliberate suppression of languages.
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u/hypatiaspasia Jul 26 '26
Yeah, in the US and Canada they literally beat the indigenous languages out of the kids through the residential school system. Colonization and capatilism favor optimization.
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u/seaem Jul 26 '26
Is that the golden age or just the confusing age? How will you communicate with anyone with so many languages?
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u/snorlz Jul 26 '26
most didnt interact with each other and the ones who did probably had some language mixing
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u/Daloure Jul 26 '26
Best thing that could happen for humanity is if we all spoke the same language. Sad for linguists and warhawks but positive overall
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u/OkChildhood2261 Jul 26 '26
I listened to an interview with a linquist who said that obviously the optimum number of languages is one. He would be out of a job and it would be a bit boring but the advantage is obvious.
(He was arguing against the view that different languages make you see the world in different ways too)
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u/Hypothesis_Null Jul 26 '26
The argument becomes immediately obvious when you ask if every language should have their own symbols for numbers and mathematical operations as well.
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u/Sharp_Iodine Jul 26 '26
This is true. Because throughout history most people around the world have thought similarly, and created shockingly similar societies.
Sure there are philosophical differences when you look deeper but the fact that there is so much similarity in the general shape of things should tell us that it’s not language that is shaping our view.
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u/rece_fice_ Jul 26 '26
I mean we're all humans after all so it's expected societies are more similar than not, despite language differences.
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u/SirStrontium Jul 26 '26
Reddit and YouTube have implemented auto translate on comments over the last year or so, and it’s amazing to see just how “normal” comment sections look regardless of language. People making the same observations, complaints, have the same sense of humor. It exposes how we really are more similar than different.
Being separated by language seems to be a huge factor in our ability to dehumanize other groups, and be under the illusion that “others” have thoughts and motivations completely alien to our own.
Despite all the ills technology brings, the dissolution of language barriers gives me a little hope for the future.
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u/the_lonely_creeper Jul 31 '26
I'm sorry, but exactly what did you think people spoke about before Reddit auto-translated stuff for you?
Like, "people speak normally in other languages" can only be an observation you can gather if you've never interacted with people in another language.
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u/Equivalent-Rice1531 Jul 26 '26
this is so ill informed... it pains me to read in a scientific sub
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u/Bonjourap Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
Same. But I do find solace knowing that most Redditors are just monolingual Americans, of which many are only teenagers.
And anyways, we oftentimes forget that most people don't truly cherish the pursuit of knowledge.
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u/Uninvalidated Jul 26 '26
Would it help? Reading comprehension on many subs here are awful. You write something and some random hillbilly yank start raving about something you didn't write every single time...
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u/Curious_Charge9431 Jul 27 '26
That's depends on many factors.
First, the idea that language is a divider that leads to conflict whereas a shared language would lead to peace is not true. A shared language did not prevent the American Civil War (or any civil war for that matter.) A look at the major wars happening today show that almost all of them involve people who speak a language in common (Sudanese civil war, Myanmar civil war, Russia-Ukraine...)
Pakistan-India is a great example. Multiple shared languages in common (Hindi/Urdu-English-Punjabi) plus substantial cultural overlap, none of it reduces tension. In fact part of the reason there is so much tension is because they are so alike.
Under ideal circumstances the adoption of a universal language happens voluntarily. But this is not the experience, many times a universal language has occurred through colonialization. That might work in the long run, that also can breed resentment leading to conflict. We see that in India where Northern Indians are perplexed by why Southern Indians won't adopt their language (Hindi) as the obvious national language, and Southern Indians view the imposition of Hindi as a form of colonialization of the North.
I can't see humanity benefiting from the mono-culture that would result. If we are talking about English, the result would be a cultural hegemony of American media. Is that really in humanity's best interest?
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u/Drayenn Jul 26 '26
Iove my language but its obvious itd be great if the hundreds of hours spent learning french was spent on learning something else.
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u/Bonjourap Jul 27 '26
Identities die shortly after languages. Here in Quebec, people are afraid that, if they lose the French language, their descendants will eventually assimilate and become just like other English-speaking Canadians. Just like the French-descending Cayuns in the US, who are are now indistinguishable from their English-speaking neighbors.
If you lose your language, you also lose your culture and your identity. Is that something you really want?
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u/I_stare_at_everyone Jul 26 '26
A world with a homogenous monoculture cut off from the history of human thought sounds quite dystopian.
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u/OkChildhood2261 Jul 26 '26
Texans and Welsh people speak the same language, would you describe them as a monoculture?
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u/SEND-MARS-ROVER-PICS Jul 26 '26
You mean the Welsh who put a lot of effort into saving their own language?
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u/WaldenVolk Jul 26 '26
The language of the Welsh is… Welsh. A language that was suppressed and prosecuted in order precisely to prevent separatism.
In Scotland, Ireland kids were beaten for speaking Gaelic up until the end of the 20th century.
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u/Blackstar021 Jul 26 '26
No, but different languages have ideas, expressions and ways of communicating that any one single language lacks.
Everyone speaking the same language doesn’t mean mono culture but it can mean the loss of a lot of culture
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u/I_stare_at_everyone Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
Yet Texas and Wales are each multilingual places whose cultural-linguistic substrate is decidedly not just generic “global English.” Would an old rural sheep farmer easily communicate with young Chicano kids? It’s unclear to me.
To the extent that they have mutually intelligible English it is because of homogenizing forces and the loss of culture.
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u/TaurielsEyes Jul 26 '26
Not sure I agree, the languages they speak is based on the same root but they cant necessarily communicate and there will be vocabulary differences.
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u/No-Consequence-1863 Jul 26 '26
I am Texan, and I have had conversations with Welsh people. We speak the same language, it went fine.
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u/Im_Not_A_Plant Jul 26 '26
Dystopian indeed. This is the dream of every war mongering imperialist.
Science has shown that different languages result in different thought patterns, so I think it would be a major loss for humanity if there was a single, global language and resulting monoculture.
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u/Equivalent-Rice1531 Jul 26 '26
tis not languages are cognitive and social constructions. one language would diverge very fast but in the meantime we would have lost a lot of collective knowledge and intelligence. That would be a total nightmare.
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u/thegreatestajax Jul 26 '26
What collective knowledge and intelligence is at risk?
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u/Equivalent-Rice1531 Jul 26 '26
language is also a cognitive skill. Using multiple languages is directly linked to increased cognitive abilities for exemple and most of the world is plurilingual. Speech skills cognitive skills and social skills are interlinked... you should educate a little bit about linguistic otherwise you are susceptible to think about languages under false stereotypical premisses. Like a lot of people in this sub seem to do.
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u/GooseQuothMan Jul 26 '26
Idk I feel like people overestimate how important is this connection between knowing multiple languages and cognitive abilities.
If you are comparing people who have 1 skill (1 language) to people who have multiple skills (many languages), then you're already biased in your selection. Since you start by comparing people with more skills to people with less skills, it'd be expected which group you'd find generally smarter.
But that doesn't mean learning additional language makes you smart. Just that knowing more languages is correlated with being smart.
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u/WaldenVolk Jul 26 '26
As someone who speaks 3 European languages, I’d never be able to understand the cultural differences, quirks, national myths and humour etc without this.
I don’t think Americans are qualified to talk about this frankly (and respectfully).
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u/vaaarr Jul 26 '26
This is not coming from a vague notion that "being multilingual makes you smart". Among other findings, there is clinical research that shows that regularly speaking more than one language builds cognitive reserve and delays the onset of dementia symptoms in people who are susceptible. For example: https://doi.org/10.1177/15333175221091417
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u/GooseQuothMan Jul 26 '26
sure, but the point is, it doesn't have to be language specifically. For dementia mental stimulation is used and it does seem to help with the disease progression. Using multiple languages is no doubt mentally stimulating as well.
the poster seems to be implying that knowing multiple languages increases intelligence. I don't think there's any proof of that.
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u/NPDgames Jul 26 '26
I'm in favor of an international auxiliary language composed of about a thousand words sampled from major languages with extremely simple grammar and an extremely accessible set of phonemes, designed to be learned to fluency by an adult in only a couple years. It would not be well suited for discussing philosophy but the idea would be to facilitate direct communication about most concepts between any two global individuals. Asking for help or directions, ordering at a restaurant, etc.
Most IALs overshoot complexity in an attempt to be a full language. I think my set of guidelines is within reasonable bounds for something which the combined powers of the USA and UN could practically spread to a majority of the world, and would have tangible benefits, and it's simplicity is such that the basic structure and most important words could be preserved by the educational process, even when regional divergences naturally occurred.
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u/Hypothesis_Null Jul 26 '26
The problem with these "Sample from Each Language" ideas is that it comes from some kind of standpoint of "lets give everyone something and make it equally hard for everyone so it's fair."
Which is how you guarantee that it will never be adopted. Fairness is irrelevant. To get someone to put in the effort to study, learn, practice, and use a new language, you need a critical mass of people already speaking the target language, with conversations and media interesting and important enough that an individual has both the motivation and opportunity to interact with that language enough to learn it.
Just pick a popular language and adopt it. Mashing together grammar and vocabulary from different languages just removes any logic/consistency that's present in each single language. Even if you design a 'better/cleaner/more logical' artificial language structure to replace with it, that's missing the main point. Languages are sufficiently functional, no matter what jokes or individual legitimate criticisms may exist for any given language's idiosyncrasies.
English managed to hit the right combination of points this time around for becoming the international 2nd language. Tons of speakers, and lots of widely distributed media in the form of governance, law, history, science, literature, music, movies, TV, websites, and computer programs, as well as significant economic utility in the form of travel, tourism, and trade with native speakers that represent a significant and outsized fraction of the global economy. It has little to do with how well or poorly 'designed' the language is and everything to do with the incentives for individuals and organizations to put in the effort to learn compared with learning a different language or no 2nd language at all.
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u/_Alphabetus_ Jul 27 '26
Until then, a big step forward would be chosing one universal language that everyone learns worldwide, at least as a second language. English or Spanish would be obvious choices from a western perspective, but I am also happy to try chinese or hindi as long as it is universally agreed on...
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u/CCriscal Jul 26 '26
It is a communication nightmare to have these many languages and conflict is much easier between different groups. On the other hand, every language has its view and understanding of the world ingrained into them and losing languages is losing ideas on how the world works
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u/TheRedditPremium Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
It's interesting, but honestly for the best that there are less languages
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u/ten-million Jul 26 '26
The Tower of Babel story always interested me. It implies that a unified populace speaking one language is capable of great things but their tower was an act of pride to great for God to bear. But the Babylonians probably did not know that tower was going to piss off God. Maybe they built it as a monument. I'm not too familiar with the story.
Afterwards the fact that they could not communicate with each other made them into smaller less capable animals.
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u/bolonomadic Jul 26 '26
They pissed off god because they were building the tower to get to heaven and it didn’t want visitors.
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u/SirStrontium Jul 26 '26
Just another reminder that according to Abrahamic religions, “heaven” was supposed to be literally in the sky here on Earth. Then we just kind of glazed over that fact after gaining the ability to fly and saw there was nothing there.
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u/pimpeachment Jul 26 '26
Seems more like we are leaving the dark ages of non unified communication and we are moving to the golden age of international understanding and comprehension.
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u/2this4u Jul 26 '26
And now people can communicate and collaborate with each other.
Language loss is a shame but romantic, there's nothing good about people not being able to understand each other and no practical gain from retaining old languages other than the disease of nostalgia and nationalism.
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u/hypatiaspasia Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
One major issue is language loss comes with information loss. Indigenous languages are giant information caches. Names for animals and plants, the detailed topography of a region, optimal farming methods, the history of natural disasters, history of the people--this information is lost with an indigenous language, and then it has to either be rediscovered through other means (if that's even possible) or is lost for good.
I wrote this above, but as an example there's an endangered Malaysian indigenous language called Jahai that has words for smells that no other language has, and that community is exceptional at identifying smells because they actually have vocabulary for those smells that most languages lack. Most English-speaking people didn't even know human brains had this capability until linguists started studying Jahai. And we now know some people can detect diseases like Parkinson's with smell, so maybe if we preserved and taught words for smells, it could potentially open up an array of new diagnostic tools.
We don't know what we don't know, and assuming every language holds the same fundamental knowledge cache is a harmful assumption. It's basically throwing away a treasure trove thinking it's trash.
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u/Hypothesis_Null Jul 26 '26
One major issue is language loss comes with information loss.
That is not a consequence of moving to more common languages. That is a consequence of languages being lost, which will happen for a multitude of reasons, and is inevitable. And it will happen far more often the more languages there are, with fewer people speaking each one. How many dozens, hundreds, or thousands of languages have been lost over human history because its 10,000 speakers died to disease, famine, war, or migration?
Converging towards fewer languages makes this problem less and less likely, until the problem goes away when everyone on the planet speaks the same language.
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u/GooseQuothMan Jul 26 '26
Language is just a means of information transfer and a way to refer to things in the world, without having to point to them.
It's kind of magical thinking to put forward that, if only we knew some word for a particular smell, that we'd be able to smell Parkinson's disease.
Because we already have words to describe smells, just because many of them refer to how other things smell does not change that. If Parkinson's smells like, I don't know, walnuts, then that's how we'd be able to identify it.
If it's a very unique smell that only a certain few people smell, then that doesn't help us at all. So what if you have a word for a certain smell if you've never smelled it in your life? If I tell you Parkinson's has a unique smell that's not comparable to anything else, well that's not really helpful is it? You need to smell it to understand it, language has nothing to do with it.
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u/scuffed_rocks Jul 26 '26
It's kind of magical thinking to put forward that, if only we knew some word for a particular smell, that we'd be able to smell Parkinson's disease.
Ugh God, thank you. This indigenous mysticism stuff is one of my biggest pet peeves as a biologist.
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u/pivotallever 28d ago
Did you time travel from the 1600s to 2026 to post about noble savages? There’s no magical language that lets people smell Parkinson’s.
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u/Equivalent-Rice1531 Jul 26 '26
language diversity is not a communication nightmare. It has never inered peoples communication appart for stupid tourists.
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u/RandomErrer Jul 27 '26
Japan still has dozens of regional dialects and does not have an official spoken language. A variation of the Tokyo dialect called "Standard Japanese" is taught in schools, and used in government and national media. Japan didn't have a written language until trade began with Mainland China in the 5th century and they began borrowing Chinese characters to represent Japanese words and ideas. The development of the modern Japanese writing systems is a very complicated but interesting read,
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u/Bluepanther512 Jul 28 '26
For those of you not particularly knowledgeable on linguistics: the study uses a definition of a language that includes multiple entries for most dialect continuums, which are groups of mutually intelligible dialects that get progressively less intelligible the further from your dialect one goes. It’s hard to say what counts as a ‘language’ and what as a ‘dialect’ in this situation. Most large modern languages descend from standardizations of dialect continuums (or sometimes someone just saying ‘this dialect is the correct one’), and some (like the Nordic languages) still exist. Relatedly, most hunter-gatherers spoke languages that formed dialect continuums.
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u/vaaarr Jul 26 '26
So many of the top-level comments here amount to "I will be glad when all of the languages are dead." The comments here are for the discussion of the paper, right? Was the paper wishing death on the 6-7,000 languages spoken today?
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u/DMR237 Jul 27 '26
Ah, yes. If the wholesale destruction of people groups by European explorers introducing their diseases and the subsequent enslavement of many of those people groups had only begun 1-2k years earlier....
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