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Ulviyya Poladova

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Humanity is currently estimated to speak around 7,500 languages, with English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic and French among the most widely used when both native and non-native speakers are counted. Yet this figure represents only a fraction of the linguistic diversity that once existed, AzerNEWS reports.

According to Reuters, researchers have used mathematical models alongside evidence from anthropology, linguistics and demography to reconstruct the history of global language diversity over roughly 12,000 years, beginning around the end of the last Ice Age during the Holocene epoch. Their findings suggest that the number of languages may have reached its historical peak between the first millennium BC and the first millennium AD, when tens of thousands of languages could have been spoken around the world.

The study estimates that the total number of languages at its peak may have ranged from 30,000 to more than 75,000. Since then, linguistic diversity has declined significantly. Researchers link much of this reduction to the replacement of smaller languages by more dominant ones, driven by the expansion of ancient empires and, later, European colonialism.

Claire Bowern, a professor of linguistics and anthropology at Yale University and one of the study’s leaders, emphasized that languages are much more than communication systems. They preserve the knowledge, memories and cultural experiences of the communities that speak them. For researchers, languages can also provide valuable clues about the past, including where populations lived, what they ate and how they understood the world.

The development of numerous language families was accompanied by the emergence of writing. Written language first appeared in Mesopotamia during the fourth millennium BC, with Sumerian recorded in cuneiform, and later developed independently in regions including Egypt, China and Mesoamerica.

Because direct historical records are extremely limited, researchers could not simply count the languages spoken in ancient societies. Instead, they developed simulation models based on known relationships between languages, populations and social structures. They also examined data from 171 existing hunter-gatherer societies in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia to estimate the size of ethnolinguistic communities near the beginning of the Holocene.

Around 12,000 years ago, human populations were relatively small and scattered across the planet, largely living in mobile hunter-gatherer groups. Agriculture, permanent settlements and more complex social structures had not yet become widespread. The researchers estimate that these populations spoke between approximately 4,500 and 6,200 languages.

As populations increased and societies became larger and more complex over the following millennia, linguistic diversity also expanded, eventually reaching a level far greater than anything seen in the modern world.