As a linguist, certain headlines make me sit up even on a lazy Sunday morning. A study just out in Science claims that, roughly two thousand years ago, people on Earth spoke as many as 75,000 distinct tongues. Today barely over 7,000 survive, and the count keeps shrinking. Between those two figures lies a twelve-thousand-year story of empires, migrations and, more recently, digital platforms nudging everyone toward the same communicative code. As someone who genuinely loves this subject, I found the research too compelling not to share with anyone who follows this blog.

From 75,000 prehistoric tongues to today’s 7,000: what the study found

The research team, led by Damián Blasi (Harvard and ICREA) alongside Marcus Hamilton, Russell Gray and Claire Bowern, set out to reconstruct how many forms of human communication existed across the Holocene, the geological epoch that began roughly twelve thousand years ago. Since extinct languages rarely leave material traces behind, the authors combined ethnographic data from 171 hunter-gatherer and fishing societies with prehistoric population estimates and statistical models capable of simulating thousands of plausible trajectories.

The most striking finding concerns exactly when that peak occurred. Twelve thousand years ago, when the global population numbered no more than seven million people, the researchers estimate between 4,500 and 6,200 varieties existed, fewer than are catalogued now. Agriculture then let communities grow and splinter, multiplying local speech forms until they reached an apex somewhere between 20,000 and 75,000 languages, achieved between 1000 BCE and 1000 CE. Claire Bowern, a co-author of the paper, called this “the most unexpected result”: nobody had pictured a linguistic golden age sitting so close to us in historical terms.

Rise and fall through the age of empires

From that point the trajectory reversed, and it never climbed back. According to Blasi’s team, the decline was not triggered by the great European colonial migrations, as one might assume, but by far older processes: the expansion of centralized empires, Rome included, which imposed their administrative tongues across vast territories and gradually wiped out hundreds of local speech communities that lacked political or commercial clout. Modern colonization, in other words, merely accelerated a mechanism it did not invent.

As Blasi himself points out, a linguistic feature spreads not because it is inherently superior to another, but because it happened to be carried by populations that expanded across territory. That observation applies to today’s English too, and it is worth keeping in mind before treating the dominance of any single idiom as somehow natural.

English as lingua franca and today’s new sameness

The pattern this research describes echoes what is unfolding right in front of us. Globalization, digital commerce and social networks have made English the default tool for communication across fields ranging from work to science, from tourism to entertainment. Even the field I work in, content and localization, tells a parallel story of tension: on one side, audiences need copy that speaks to them in their native tongue; on the other, pressure keeps building toward standardized formats often drafted first in English and adapted elsewhere afterward (I touched on this while tracing the evolution of localization, from fax machines to AI).

None of this is about vilifying a language that, to be fair, lets people from wildly different backgrounds understand one another. The point linguists raise is a different one: when a single code becomes the standard for economic and social prestige, people who grow up speaking a dialect or a minority idiom tend to drop it within two or three generations, much as happened in territories once ruled by ancient empires.

Why linguistic variety is a cultural heritage worth guarding

Every vanishing tongue carries with it a distinct way of sorting the world: terms with no direct equivalent elsewhere, grammatical structures that encode kinship or spatial relationships in ways English or Italian simply don’t, oral repertoires of stories, songs and technical knowledge passed down for centuries. For anyone who works with words, this stands as concrete proof that countless solutions exist to the problem of communicating, and that none of them holds a monopoly on it.

This logic applies on a smaller scale too, to regional dialects and minority speech everywhere, often pushed into a purely domestic or folkloric role while schools and media push a more and more standardized national tongue. That same attention to how wording can include or exclude an audience, something I explored in this piece on inclusive language, comes from recognizing that choices about words are never neutral: they reflect who gets heard and who stays at the margins of public conversation.

Between extinction and revival: what can be done

The good news, if it can be called that, is that researchers aren’t simply documenting decline. Digital documentation projects are recording languages spoken by just a few dozen people before they vanish entirely, while some indigenous communities are bringing back idioms once thought lost, through immersion schools and teaching materials built for younger generations. Technology, often blamed for flattening differences, can also become a tool for preservation: sound archives, collaborative dictionaries and machine translation tools built for minority tongues keep multiplying.

Staying curious about this wealth, even just by looking into the speech forms native to one’s own corner of the world, is already a small act against sameness. Because a dying idiom doesn’t just take words with it; it takes an entire outlook on reality that no other code will ever capture with quite the same precision.

Related sources

• Blasi, D.E., Hamilton, M.J., Gray, R.D., Bowern, C.L., “The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene”, Science (2026)
• Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, “The lost golden age of language diversity”
• “Three Millennia Ago, Humans May Have Spoken Thousands More Languages Than We Have Today, During a Linguistic ‘Golden Age’”, Smithsonian Magazine
• “Parlavamo 75mila lingue: uno studio sulla diversità linguistica umana”, Exibart