I came across a paper in the journal Science recently, with the somewhat dramatic title “The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene.” It’s fairly common knowledge that linguistic diversity has been declining for some time, but how long, and at what rate, has been a subject of some debate. There is a popular narrative both in an out of scholastic circles which blames the loss of languages (about 4 unique languages per year) on a combination of the dominance of English in the international system, the current international order, and the effects of European colonialism. It sounds like a compelling argument, but there isn’t a lot of data to support it, in part because studying languages that no longer exist from thousands of years ago when they weren’t written down or the writings have vanished is something of an exercise in futility.
Blasi et al. take a different approach by using statistical modeling based on data regarding extant languages and societal dynamics to project language profusion throughout the last twelve thousand years. What they find is that linguistic diversity peaked somewhere between two and four thousand years ago and has been declining pretty steadily since then, with limited change in the rate of decline since the Age of Exploration. Far from being a modern phenomenon, the declining diversity of language owes more to broad, civilizational factors, like the onset of agriculture and settlement of large city-states, than it does to the dominance of English in the current international system. This makes sense if you stop to think about it – when people lived mostly in small communities, they could have internal languages which only they understood, and there could be hundreds or thousands of them within a relatively small area. As people became more concentrated, there were fewer independent groups maintaining their own languages, so the number of extant languages naturally fell.
The next step in this line of inquiry which I would like to see is a look at what happens to the languages which replace the languages which disappear. Is there an increase in the internal diversity of the languages which displace languages which disappear? Intuition suggests there should be, and the history of English, which I am still learning about through Stroud’s podcast, supports it. As English has expanded and become spoken in more places, or as it encounters other languages, it has increased both in number of words and the complexity of ways in which ideas can be expressed. English began as an Anglo-Saxon dialectic coming primarily out of the Germanic languages and ultimately deriving from proto-Indo-European, and acquired (minimal) Celtic influences, Norse influences, French influences (and, by way of French, Latin and Greek), German influences, Dutch influences, and more recently influences from languages all around the world.
Anyway, this is a relatively short post. There is more we could discuss about the evolution of language, but I mainly wanted to share the paper. It’s always satisfying to see a real study being done to either support or correct a broadly corrected narrative which isn’t necessarily grounded in reality. Something is still lost when we lose unique languages, but it is also worth reminding ourselves that those losses are the result of broad, civilizational forces ongoing for thousands of years.
IGC Publishing 