La Jornada: The languages ​​used worldwide have been reduced to 7,500, study reveals

Washington. On a global scale, some 7,500 languages ​​are currently used, with English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic and French being the most common, counting both native and non-native speakers; However, we are very far from the maximum number recorded throughout history.

Researchers used mathematical models and knowledge of anthropology, linguistics and demography to estimate the number of languages ​​used around the world about 12 thousand years ago, towards the end of the last Ice Age, covering a period called the “Holocene epoch.” They identified a period spanning from the first millennium BC to the first millennium AD, in which humanity could have spoken tens of thousands of different languages. Likewise, they registered a significant decline since this linguistic “golden age”, due to the replacement of languages ​​driven by factors such as the expansion of great empires in Antiquity and European colonialism in recent centuries.

Diverse cultural world

“Languages ​​are important to their communities. They transmit knowledge, associations and memories,” said Claire Bowern, professor of linguistics and anthropology at Yale University, in Connecticut, and one of those responsible for the study published in the journal Science.

“For scientists, languages ​​contain enormous amounts of information about the past, from where people lived to what they ate and what they talked about. In addition, they open a window into the human mind,” he added.

The researchers estimated that the number peaked at between 30,000 and potentially more than 75,000 different languages ​​used around the world at any one time.

“We rarely realize that, until just a few thousand years ago, humanity inhabited a much more diverse cultural world than the one we know today,” said the study’s lead author, Damian Blasi, a cognitive scientist and evolutionary anthropologist at the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies in Spain.

“Until very recently there was no direct evidence about the number of languages. We cannot rely on the extremely incomplete records of antiquity. But, since we know a lot about the relationships between languages ​​and societies, we can make a couple of assumptions to build a simulation model of linguistic diversification over time,” Bowern explained.

The scientists used data from 171 modern-day hunter-gatherer societies in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia to assess the size of ethnolinguistic groups – each representing a different language – near the start of the Holocene. They applied that data to estimates of the human population of the time.

People were dispersed in small bands throughout the world, living as nomadic hunter-gatherers, without the beginning of agriculture or the establishment of permanent settlements and more complex cultures. Researchers estimated that these dispersed populations, about 12,000 years ago, spoke perhaps between 4,500 and 6,200 languages.

As the world’s population gradually grew over the following millennia and human society changed, the number of languages ​​increased.

Bowern also pointed out that old languages ​​can evolve into new languages, as happened with Latin, which transformed into languages ​​such as French, Italian and Spanish in the centuries after the demise of the Western Roman Empire.

Linguistic resistance

Colonial powers often practiced linguistic imperialism; However, some managed to persist. For example, the languages ​​of the Incas, Mayans, and Aztecs survived attempts at suppression by the Spanish.

Approximately half of the languages ​​used today are considered endangered. Bowern stated that “90 percent of the world’s population speaks 10 percent of the world’s languages, so there are many, many languages ​​with a small number of sign language speakers and users.”