If we think about pre-agriculture human societies, you have many small groups occupying different economic niches who may trade, fight, or intermarry with one another but are generally constrained in size and power by a lack of surplus. Lots of opportunity for many different isolated language communities to exist.
Sedentary agriculture leads to larger units of society and to more centralized power, which by its very nature erodes linguistic diversity. The existence of trade networks, tax collection, organized religion and the like force people to learn one another's language, and create the concepts of "trade" and "prestige" languages.
You can see how this played out in waves in Europe, the Near East, India, China, etc.
The remaining places with a high degree of linguistic diversity (in terms of more language families or language isolates) until very recently are those where more traditional human societies lasted longer. For example, Siberia, New Guinea, or Australia and North America before European contact.
With current tech we are close to having a babel fish to put in our ear as a near universal translator. I have a dream that this will enable huge linguistic diversity, even down to one language per person, as translation costs approach nil. I could privately alias "blue" as "orange" and cause no confusion ... except for the increasingly niche application of meat speaking directly to meat.
How fast might a specialty language evolve if changes are no longer a barrier to understanding and propagate to the whole network in real time? Changes that used to take generations could happen in days or hours, meme by meme.
Human languages aren't just a set of more or less arbitrary conventions relating groups of sounds with meanings. Language is probably humanity's greatest and most advanced technology, making most of the other ones possible. And it's also art and play, a repository of original wisdom encoded in the various etymologies. It steers thinking down certain pathways in ways which are hard to even point to - because it would be a bit like the finger trying to point at itself. They are collectively created artifacts which encode the wisdom of generations. The deeper, wider and more diverse that pool, the more powerful the product. A human language invented by one person or by a group of people cannot ever compare in depth and richness to the languages most people use to communicate and think.
I would expect the opposite, languages converging if for nothing else to please the ear.
Just look at unit systems. People go crazy over metric versus imperial units or old outdated units being used. And yet converting between units has never been easier. Many industries invented their own units to fit their use case, but once their products spread to national or global distribution everything gets standardized to the most common unit.
While preservation and enablement of niche languages is enriching imho, another incentive for individualism - one person = one language - is just the destruction of the core value of human achievements. Another step towards a solarian[0] society.
Caveat: if you read the full text/supplementary materials, it becomes clear it's actually about ethnolinguistic groups, not languages. I doubt that all the languages were unintelligible to each other given that intelligibility is a continuum and the large estimate they postulate (maximum of 40k languages 1000-3000 years ago)
What a coincidence I was just recently wondering when in history had the most distinct languages spoken. This peak described here is later than what I remember reading.
> Great loss of linguistic diversity did not begin with recent colonial expansion but as multinational empires first spread along with their languages, pathogens, and cultures.
Still, the guns (or in general, weapons) part was important, centuries of in practice isolation eventually gives you a different language, until an invader wipes your population, culture and language because it wants more resources and new territories for expansion over slaves that can't understand them (or germs finishing the work anyway).
Low granularity on data over long periods doesn't help there, with history, written word and then mass printing not only you get better records, but also you get a pressure for normalization and loss of language diversity.
A colony is a specific thing. It isn't like London colonized the north of England, or Paris colonized France, but the power of those cities resulted in a loss of linguistic diversity in the region.
This is interesting, but I have substantial doubt as to how accurately this models the actual number of languages that existed at times in the distant past.
It makes sense.
If we think about pre-agriculture human societies, you have many small groups occupying different economic niches who may trade, fight, or intermarry with one another but are generally constrained in size and power by a lack of surplus. Lots of opportunity for many different isolated language communities to exist.
Sedentary agriculture leads to larger units of society and to more centralized power, which by its very nature erodes linguistic diversity. The existence of trade networks, tax collection, organized religion and the like force people to learn one another's language, and create the concepts of "trade" and "prestige" languages.
You can see how this played out in waves in Europe, the Near East, India, China, etc.
The remaining places with a high degree of linguistic diversity (in terms of more language families or language isolates) until very recently are those where more traditional human societies lasted longer. For example, Siberia, New Guinea, or Australia and North America before European contact.
With current tech we are close to having a babel fish to put in our ear as a near universal translator. I have a dream that this will enable huge linguistic diversity, even down to one language per person, as translation costs approach nil. I could privately alias "blue" as "orange" and cause no confusion ... except for the increasingly niche application of meat speaking directly to meat.
How fast might a specialty language evolve if changes are no longer a barrier to understanding and propagate to the whole network in real time? Changes that used to take generations could happen in days or hours, meme by meme.
Human languages aren't just a set of more or less arbitrary conventions relating groups of sounds with meanings. Language is probably humanity's greatest and most advanced technology, making most of the other ones possible. And it's also art and play, a repository of original wisdom encoded in the various etymologies. It steers thinking down certain pathways in ways which are hard to even point to - because it would be a bit like the finger trying to point at itself. They are collectively created artifacts which encode the wisdom of generations. The deeper, wider and more diverse that pool, the more powerful the product. A human language invented by one person or by a group of people cannot ever compare in depth and richness to the languages most people use to communicate and think.
Mighty rivers start as a trickle. Enough trickles and fetch happens.
>How fast might a specialty language evolve
Pretty fast, actually. At least if you leave it up to kids.†
† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language
I would expect the opposite, languages converging if for nothing else to please the ear.
Just look at unit systems. People go crazy over metric versus imperial units or old outdated units being used. And yet converting between units has never been easier. Many industries invented their own units to fit their use case, but once their products spread to national or global distribution everything gets standardized to the most common unit.
While preservation and enablement of niche languages is enriching imho, another incentive for individualism - one person = one language - is just the destruction of the core value of human achievements. Another step towards a solarian[0] society.
[0] https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Solaria
But why would anyone want that? Having interpersonal communication gated behind some translation technology is some dystopian nightmare.
Reminds me of this possible development: https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3576
BS. We don't even have training data for the more than 6000 languages in the tail of the distribution.
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Caveat: if you read the full text/supplementary materials, it becomes clear it's actually about ethnolinguistic groups, not languages. I doubt that all the languages were unintelligible to each other given that intelligibility is a continuum and the large estimate they postulate (maximum of 40k languages 1000-3000 years ago)
What a coincidence I was just recently wondering when in history had the most distinct languages spoken. This peak described here is later than what I remember reading.
> Great loss of linguistic diversity did not begin with recent colonial expansion but as multinational empires first spread along with their languages, pathogens, and cultures.
Insert "they're the same picture" meme here.
Guns, Germs and Steel in cultural terms?
Still, the guns (or in general, weapons) part was important, centuries of in practice isolation eventually gives you a different language, until an invader wipes your population, culture and language because it wants more resources and new territories for expansion over slaves that can't understand them (or germs finishing the work anyway).
Low granularity on data over long periods doesn't help there, with history, written word and then mass printing not only you get better records, but also you get a pressure for normalization and loss of language diversity.
It’s not limited to conquest, migration takes a heavy toll on languages spoken by a small number of people.
I envy (or maybe feel for) the longevity of those who see the Mongol Empire, the Roman Empire, the Babylonian Empire as recent events.
They're not the same. "recent" and "first" are doing a lot of work in the quoted sentence.
A colony is a specific thing. It isn't like London colonized the north of England, or Paris colonized France, but the power of those cities resulted in a loss of linguistic diversity in the region.
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Something poignant about the knowledge in this paper staying lost behind a paywall.
Supplementary materials https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/science.adx4343/su...
Full text: https://www.science.org/eprint/QDZNYBWGCVEJ2RCTX5JI/full?act...
fortunately the scientific method is here to defibrillate this flattening line with a pulse of Original Chaos.
This is interesting, but I have substantial doubt as to how accurately this models the actual number of languages that existed at times in the distant past.