Study Reveals Lost Golden Age of Global Language Diversity
Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages
Our research traces global language diversity over 12,000 years, uncovering a golden age between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago when tens of thousands of languages flourished. This era ended with the rise of large states and empires, which drove a rapid decline in linguistic variety long before European colonial expansion. Today's 7,600 languages represent a biased sample of survivors, challenging previous assumptions about when and why language extinction began.
Political currents don't have to move in one direction. It's not inevitable that endangered languages become extinct.
- gregdaniels421
> political currents don’t have to move in one direction. It’s not inevitable that endangered languages become extinct.
There really isn't any good incentive to learn a language with very few speakers, since unless you already know a speaker, you really can't practice the real language. People were a few years ago at least hoping llms could help preserve the languages, but more most of them, there just aren't enough samples for any real preservation. I knew some dudes in college that were linguists that worked on recording native speakers of endangered languages, and while I hoped they would succeed, I never really had much hope of it working.
- thisisauserid
Between one and three thousand years ago.
- boonzeet
A minor point, but the colour scheme on that chart infuriates me. When the data can be seen a progression (not endangered -> threatened -> few known speakers -> no known speakers), why use red to green but in a random order?
- smitty1e
An interesting tangent to the language discussion is the Epic of Gilgamesh => https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-epic-o...
- jmyeet
> We show that language isn’t isolated from political currents and that this dynamic has been a facet of human history for much longer than previously thought.
Um, when did anyone think it wasn't?
The entire history of linguistics shows this. Proto-Indo European had no common word (for that family) for sea/ocean [1] from which we can deduce something about the people who spoke it. That's not political obviously but environment and culture are inseparable from language is the ponit.
Languages really only grew for political reasons. Look at the spread of Latin throughout Roman territories.
Likewise, languages splinter and diverge in isolation. Populations that remain where they are and separate from others will drift linguistically. You can look at most of Europe for this. As just one example, the drift in Swiss Germany in Switzerland, which is a relatively small country.
But more than that, it takes some kind of centralization, which is to say, political force, to maintain a language. English had massive changes from Old English (which is essentially a separate language from Modern English) to Middle English (which is largely comprehensible by the modern speaker) when French was the court language of England in the centuries after 1066. And the Normans left their own imprints on English, which is where a ton of loan words came from [2]. But English grammar also greatly simplified without a central authority telling everyone what is proper, basically [3].
One of the fascinating […]