The Golden Age of Language might have boasted 75,000 languages approximately 2,000 years ago
Also this week: The Herculaneum scrolls are giving up their secrets + The Bantu Expansion: The mass migration that transformed sub-Saharan Africa
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Linguistic Discovery digest, a weekly roundup of the latest language-related news, research in linguistics, interesting reads from the week, and newest books and other media dealing with language and linguistics!
🆕 New from Linguistic Discovery
This week’s content from Linguistic Discovery.
Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek
Around 1,000 Greek words can’t be traced to any Indo-European language. Where do they come from?
In this issue of the Linguistic Discovery newsletter, we’ll dig through layers of linguistic history to reveal the mystery language that influenced Ancient Greek.
Cool Features in this Issue
- A custom map of where the Pre-Greek language was likely spoken, based on evidence from toponyms (place names)
- A big list of English words that ultimately derive from Pre-Greek
Daniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.
🔓 Unlocked: The People’s Tongue: The Great Men™ of Language
This article is now available to all subscribers, free or paid. So if you weren’t able to read it when it came out, have a read now!
Language is shaped by everyday people, not the Big Names™ of history.
Daniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.
How Semitic languages got their 3-consonant roots
As part of my collaboration with St. John’s College, I put together this 3-minute overview of how Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew got their fascinating 3-consonant root structure:
🗞️ Current Linguistics
Recently published research in linguistics.
The Golden Age of Languages
New research suggests that language extinction began with the rise of nation-states rather than colonialism. Here’s a excerpt from the abstract of the research paper:
Before the onset of plant and animal domestication, the number of languages was smaller than it is today (4500 to 6000 compared with 7500). Subsequent increases in global population precipitated increased linguistic diversity. We uncovered a linguistic “golden age” with tens of thousands of languages 3000 to 1000 years ago. 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.
Like most good research, this finding isn’t entirely novel, but rather expands our existing knowledge on the topic. Many linguists have estimated that the rise of nation-states was a major driver of language death, and that prior to the Neolithic (Agrarian) Revolution (when humans adopted sedentary, urban lifestyles), there were significantly more languages than in use today (or, at least, more languages per capita). In The history of languages (Amazon), Tore Janson estimates that ~7,500 languages were spoken among a total human population of ~15 million approximately 12,000 years ago. In Empires of the word: A language history of the world, Nicholas Ostler speaks of the “state of nature” for languages:
The presumption is that before the discovery and expansion of agriculture, human communities were small bands, just as the remaining groupings of hunter-gatherers are to this day. These groups all have languages, and ancient lore and stories which the old retail to the young. The density of the human population, wherever people were living, would have been far less than it is today. It is a commonplace of historical linguistics that related languages diverge when contact ceases between groups, so we can also presume that in this early period each self-sufficient community, of up to a few thousand people, would by and large have had its own language.
All this changed in communities that adopted a settled way of life, based on herding and agriculture. Now communities would have become both larger and more organised. In settled communities, one’s neighbours in one year would remain one’s neighbours for many years, indeed generations, to come. One might have dues to pay, and negotiate, with higher authorities. Festivals, and markets, would bring together people from a wide area. Militias would be raised to defend local communities, and to steal from others perceived to be weaker. There began to be a motive for communication among people over longer distances. Bilingualism would have increased in the population, and also languages would have grown in terms of the number of speakers; quite likely, too, the absolute number of languages would have fallen, smaller communities losing speakers through war, marriage or desertion, or simply a pragmatic tendency to use other people’s languages.
From the very nature of the changing situation we could have inferred these processes. But in fact it has been possible to watch them. They have been observed in accelerated development in the last couple of generations in Papua New Guinea, as the old self-sufficient ways of life in villages and hamlets yield to a wider-ranging national way of life. A feature of this transition is the decline of many of the indigenous languages and their replacement through the expansion of neighbouring tongues, or more globally by languages associated with trade at the national level, or government: utility jargons or pidgins are quickly transformed into general-purpose Creole languages, informally but effectively standardised across vast numbers of speakers. (pp. 9–10)
Nicholas Evans echoes this idea in Words of wonder: Endangered languages and what they tell us:
Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that [abundant linguistic diversity] is a good representation of how we humans have been for most of our past—not just for the 99% or so of our history up to 10,000 years ago when we were all hunter-gatherers, but also for much of the time that followed. This is because the dawn of agriculture, although it led to an explosion in human populations, did not automatically lead to the development of much larger societies. Speech communities got a bit bigger, but it was rare for them to exceed the few score thousand that could be held together as a homogenous unit without the panoply of state control that only began with our incorporation into large centralized political entities like the Roman Empire or a modern nation state. […] We see small languages wherever in the world societies have lain beyond the homogenizing reach of great empires.
The classic estimate of the world’s population on the eve of the Neolithic, 10 millennia ago, is 10 million. Combining these figures with a very generous 2,000-speaker maximum for hunter-gatherer languages suggests that, on the eve of agriculture and fixed settlements, there were already 3,000 to 5,000 languages in the world—roughly the same number as now, even though the population was less than 0.5% of its current level. If we assume 1,000 speakers per language, a more realistic figure in my view, the number doubles to between 6,000 and 10,000. Levels of language diversity whose full magnitude we can barely grasp have been with us for a very long time. […]
As agriculture spread around much of the world from then on, it is likely that increases in language populations of cultivating groups […] would have been more than offset by the explosion in overall world population, so that the number of languages in the world may have rise to 10,000 or 15,000. However, scholars like Colin Renfrew and Peter Bellwood have argued that the bearers of agricultural expansion would have been just a small number of groups who had made a radical cultural transition. […] The expansion of these few agriculture-based lineages would have produced the ‘Renfrew-Bellwood’ effect: a decrease in deep-level diversity, i.e. in the number of unrelated stocks or deep lineages, as clusters of closely related languages spread outwards from the dozen or so foci where agricultural complexes were developed. (pp. 10–15)
So, this new study both comports with and provides additional evidence for the received wisdom that linguistic diversity collapses with the rise of agricultural complexes, urbanization, and social stratification. But it adds to this story by showing how a mix of factors, such as population increases, likely resulted in peak linguistic diversity around 2,000 years ago.
I’ve linked to both a Science News article explaining the research and the original research article below.
Sujata Gupta
- Blasi et al. 2026. The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene. Science 393(6809): pp. 387–391. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adx4343.
Books Referenced
All three of these books are fantastic, and the last two in particular are among my favorite pop linguistics books.
📃 This Week’s Reads
Interesting articles I’ve come across this week.
Using virtual unwrapping, high-resolution scanning, AI and papyrological interpretation, researchers have recovered substantial readable text from unopened carbonised scrolls found in Herculaneum.
Dr Jess Venner
James McElvenny
World Politics & History
Alexandra Aikhenvald
Jennifer Gunner
📚 Books & Media
New (and old) books and media touching on language and linguistics.
The secret history of language: Language change unraveled
Lyle Campbell is one of the world’s foremost experts on historical linguistics and language change. In this new book, he unravels the processes by which languages change in a way that’s accessible for a general reader. Here’s the book’s description:
What are the causes of language change? Where do words come from? Is modern technology and social media corrupting our language? Language change is just as relevant today as it ever was, yet the secrets of how and why it occurs remain tantalisingly out of reach to anyone without a background in linguistics. This book has the answers. Written by one of the leading experts in the field, it provides readers with an accessible account of language change, unraveling the processes and phenomena that have so far remained locked within academia. It explores a range of fascinating topics, such as whether language change is bad, whether change is different in some kinds of languages than others, and if television, AI, and modern technology have any impact on language change. Written in a lively and engaging way, it uncovers the marvels and mysteries of language change for anyone curious about this captivating field.
Get your own copy at the links:
On the mark: From periods to interrobangs, how punctuation remade the world
A new book on the history of punctuation came out in August! Here’s the description:
You know the lively exclamation mark, the controversial semicolon, and the often-omitted apostrophe, but would you recognize a percontation point? How about an obelus? In this irreverent and delightfully intellectual book, Florence Hazrat argues that all punctuation marks, from the most forgotten to the most ubiquitous, are worthy of our attention. After all, the history of punctuation is the history of humankind.
The first punctuation mark was a triangular symbol pressed into clay somewhere in Mesopotamia. Spaces between words were unknown for millennia, until a group of Irish monks pioneered them in the eighth century. Across ages and cultures, amid technological revolutions and radical changes in communication, these dots and dashes have reshaped the societies that created them. From the papyruses of the ancient world to our sprawling internet ecosystem, one thing has remained constant: Punctuation is powerful. These tiny marks can move markets, shift elections, topple political systems, and decide the fate of a precious human life on death row.
Weaving together anthropology, the history of writing, the philosophy of language, psychology, literature, and more, On the Mark masterfully proves that punctuation is at the heart of human communication.
Get your own copy at the links:
🗃️ Resources
Maps, databases, lists, etc. on language and linguistics.
Maptism
I recently discovered the wonderful cartographic work at Maptism, which makes gorgeous and highly accurate maps of the archaeological cultures of Europe and Asia, and makes those maps available for use under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. I’m very excited to know these maps exist as a resource now. As one example, here is a series of maps showing the change from Mycenaean Greece through the Greek Dark Ages.
Maptism
👋🏼 Till next week!
Can confirm, this was the final boss for my PhD.
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