Study uncovers lost ‘golden age’ of languages
Summary
A Yale-led study argues there was a global linguistic 'golden age' 1,000 to 3,000 years ago when tens of thousands of languages were spoken, followed by a long decline as states and empires expanded. The researchers assert today’s ~7,600 languages are a biased sample of a much richer past, with extinction shaped by political power; they combine ethnographic data, prehistoric population estimates, and Holocene modeling, publishing in Science.