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EXCERPTS: A new study in Science reconstructs the rise and fall of language diversity over the past 12,000 years. Its models suggest that humanity reached a linguistic “golden age” between roughly 1000 B.C.E. and C.E. 1000, when perhaps 20,000 to 75,000 languages coexisted — several times the roughly 7,600 spoken and signed today.
Then diversity plunged abruptly. While it’s tempting to blame colonialism, this was not the prime factor. The researchers argue that the collapse began well before European colonialism, as expanding states and multinational empires spread their languages, institutions, populations and diseases across previously independent communities. Colonial powers did later accelerate that process but may not have started it.
[...] Expanding powers, whether Rome around the Mediterranean, the Han dynasty across much of China, or later Arab-Islamic states across the Middle East and North Africa, carried dominant languages into newly conquered or absorbed communities. Latin, varieties of Chinese and Arabic spread through government, trade, religion and education, often displacing smaller local languages over generations.
Language loss did not necessarily require mass killing or a formal ban. Conquered or absorbed populations could survive while gradually abandoning their own speech. A state language might become necessary for social advancement, while children increasingly learned it instead of the language spoken by their grandparents. Over generations, a small language could disappear even as its former speakers became part of a larger population.
European colonial expansion after about 1500 CE intensified this process, sometimes through the deliberate suppression of Indigenous languages and religion. But the study argues that the decline had already been underway for many centuries. “It takes much less than a colonial powerhouse to destroy linguistic diversity,” Blasi told Scientific American.
“The languages we see today are the survivors of a massive and highly selective historical bottleneck,” added Russell Gray, a co-author, said in a Yale press release... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: A new study in Science reconstructs the rise and fall of language diversity over the past 12,000 years. Its models suggest that humanity reached a linguistic “golden age” between roughly 1000 B.C.E. and C.E. 1000, when perhaps 20,000 to 75,000 languages coexisted — several times the roughly 7,600 spoken and signed today.
Then diversity plunged abruptly. While it’s tempting to blame colonialism, this was not the prime factor. The researchers argue that the collapse began well before European colonialism, as expanding states and multinational empires spread their languages, institutions, populations and diseases across previously independent communities. Colonial powers did later accelerate that process but may not have started it.
[...] Expanding powers, whether Rome around the Mediterranean, the Han dynasty across much of China, or later Arab-Islamic states across the Middle East and North Africa, carried dominant languages into newly conquered or absorbed communities. Latin, varieties of Chinese and Arabic spread through government, trade, religion and education, often displacing smaller local languages over generations.
Language loss did not necessarily require mass killing or a formal ban. Conquered or absorbed populations could survive while gradually abandoning their own speech. A state language might become necessary for social advancement, while children increasingly learned it instead of the language spoken by their grandparents. Over generations, a small language could disappear even as its former speakers became part of a larger population.
European colonial expansion after about 1500 CE intensified this process, sometimes through the deliberate suppression of Indigenous languages and religion. But the study argues that the decline had already been underway for many centuries. “It takes much less than a colonial powerhouse to destroy linguistic diversity,” Blasi told Scientific American.
“The languages we see today are the survivors of a massive and highly selective historical bottleneck,” added Russell Gray, a co-author, said in a Yale press release... (MORE - missing details)