Overview
- The paper published Thursday in Science presents a new quantitative reconstruction of language counts over the past 12,000 years using data from 171 hunter‑gatherer and fisher groups, prehistoric population estimates, and social‑computational models.
- The team estimates roughly 4,500–6,200 languages at the start of the Holocene and finds a rapid rise that peaked between about 1,000 and 3,000 years ago with models producing tens of thousands of languages in many scenarios.
- The authors attribute the long decline that began over the last two millennia mainly to the expansion of larger states and empires and note European colonialism later accelerated language loss.
- Specialists caution the results depend strongly on hard‑to‑verify assumptions—such as typical ancient community sizes, how fast speech varieties diverge into separate languages, and how to treat dialect continua—and call for regional, data‑driven follow ups.
- If the findings hold, they imply strong survivor bias in today’s ~7,500 languages, affect how linguists infer typical language features, and reinforce urgency for targeted documentation because about four languages still disappear each year.