Das verlorene goldene Zeitalter der Sprachvielfalt: Vor 1.000 bis 3.000 Jahren existierten möglicherweise Zehntausende Sprachen – und ihr Niedergang begann lange vor der europäischen Kolonialexpansion
https://www.mpg.de/26871018/the-lost-golden-age-of-language-diversity?c=2249
19 Kommentare
Seems logical if people couldn’t travel great distances and printing wasn’t widely available, then languages would diverge and develop (and also be confined to) in smaller regions.
It’s not a decline or a great diying, it’s just better conditions of communication.
Because it’s important to be able to communicate with your trading partners. That’s it, that’s the end of the story.
Best thing that could happen for humanity is if we all spoke the same language. Sad for linguists and warhawks but positive overall
This to me is completely crazy
>The team then combined these estimates with reconstructions suggesting that the global human population 12,000 years ago was between approximately 4.4 and seven million. Assuming that ethnolinguistic groups at that time generally corresponded to distinct languages, the models produced an early-Holocene estimate centred on roughly 4,500 to 6,200 languages, although broader plausible estimates ranged from around 3,300 to 7,800.
So that is somewhere between 2,100 speakers on average at the upper end of their estimates to as few as 570 on the lower end for a language.
And now people can communicate and collaborate with each other.
Language loss is a shame but romantic, there’s nothing good about people not being able to understand each other and no practical gain from retaining old languages other than the disease of nostalgia and nationalism.
It is a communication nightmare to have these many languages and conflict is much easier between different groups. On the other hand, every language has its view and understanding of the world ingrained into them and losing languages is losing ideas on how the world works
The golden age of more difficult communication.
My history professor was from England and used how Americans and British speak English as an example. After we split off the British nobility adopted a non-rhotic dialect, anyone directly interacting with them did the same for business, they taught their kids the same, etc. Think „governor“ vs „govna.“
Well before European expansion we had dozens of empires from the Mongols to Incas where they would conquer people, tell them they’re in a region of the empire under someone’s control, but if the equivalent of a city mayor wanted to directly discuss things with that leader they’d have to learn the language, then would teach their kids, and on.
It was an interesting way to look at it, to be considered part of the group people would drop their native language.
The Tower of Babel story always interested me. It implies that a unified populace speaking one language is capable of great things but their tower was an act of pride to great for God to bear. But the Babylonians probably did not know that tower was going to piss off God. Maybe they built it as a monument. I’m not too familiar with the story.
Afterwards the fact that they could not communicate with each other made them into smaller less capable animals.
As (and if) globalization continues to increase, we can expect this phenomenon to grow further.
And nothing of value was lost.
It’s interesting, but honestly for the best that there are less languages
So many of the top-level comments here amount to „I will be glad when all of the languages are dead.“ The comments here are for the discussion of the paper, right? Was the paper wishing death on the 6-7,000 languages spoken today?
Seems more like we are leaving the dark ages of non unified communication and we are moving to the golden age of international understanding and comprehension.
I never understood why some people have decided that „language diversity“ is unconditionally a good thing. It’s mostly a bad thing. It inhibits communication, breeds serious conflicts and is inefficient. There are very good reasons why this level of language diversity has vanished.
Is that the golden age or just the confusing age? How will you communicate with anyone with so many languages?
The more independent villages you have the more languages, not surprising result at all.
a tragic loss for human history, to be honest.
Interesting to see the temporal depth here. The common narrative often links language loss directly to colonial periods, but this suggests a more complex, multi-millennia process of consolidation and extinction, likely tied to earlier agricultural expansions and state formations. This reframes the baseline, making modern rates of loss part of a much longer trend, albeit now accelerated. Would be keen to see the methodology for estimating pre-literate languages.