The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene

HappyPanacea

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.

snovymgodym

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.

bcatanzaro

Something poignant about the knowledge in this paper staying lost behind a paywall.

delichon

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.

dnnehgf

fortunately the scientific method is here to defibrillate this flattening line with a pulse of Original Chaos.