The extinction of languages is not some remote abstraction. At least four languages vanish from the world every year, and a landmark new study suggests the roots of that loss run far deeper than previously thought.
Published July 23, 2025, in the journal Science, the research reconstructs 12,000 years of linguistic history and traces the beginning of language loss not to European colonialism but to the rise of the world’s first empires centuries before.
The study draws on ethnographic data, demographic estimates, and statistical modeling to calculate how many languages humanity may have spoken before the invention of writing—a technology that emerged roughly 6,000 years ago.
The findings challenge two widely held assumptions: that linguistic diversity peaked in the Paleolithic era, and that its decline began with the European colonization of the Americas and Africa.
A Golden Age of Tens of Thousands of Languages
According to the model, between 4,500 and 6,200 languages were spoken before the domestication of plants and animals—fewer than the roughly 7,500 languages spoken today.
The population growth that followed the agricultural revolution sent that number soaring. The model places that peak somewhere between 3,000 and 1,000 years ago, with estimates reaching into the tens of thousands of languages—up to ten times as many as at the start of the Holocene.
“The most unexpected finding is just how recent that peak turns out to be,” said Claire Bowern, a professor of linguistics at Yale University and co-author of the study.
The era of greatest linguistic diversity did not fall in the distant prehistoric past. Instead, it coincided with the rise of the first great states and empires—a period the authors describe as a linguistic “golden age.”
What Caused the Collapse
From that peak, the decline was swift and sustained, accelerating sharply over the last two thousand years.
The study does not single out specific empires or events, but it identifies a clear pattern: as states consolidated power, they imposed their dominant languages along with their institutions, technologies, and diseases.
Small, dispersed populations of hunter-gatherers—who had sustained much of that diversity across thousands of years—were absorbed or displaced by larger, more organized societies.
The languages of expanding groups were far more likely to survive. The languages of absorbed communities retreated into the home and eventually fell silent.
European colonialism over the past 500 years accelerated that process on a global scale, but the study argues it did not start it. It intensified a trend already two thousand years in the making.
A Phenomenon That Continues Today
UNESCO estimates that, on average, one language dies out every two weeks, and that between 40 and 44 percent of the world’s languages are at risk of extinction.
Papua New Guinea, home to more than 800 languages, has the highest concentration of critically endangered languages on the planet.
In the Amazon and across Arctic communities, urbanization and the move to cities continue to reduce the number of young speakers—the single most important factor in the long-term survival of a language.
The case of Yaghan, spoken by communities in Tierra del Fuego, illustrates that pace especially vividly. Its last native speaker died in 2022, and with her, the language died as a living, spoken tongue.
The study’s authors are careful to note that their reconstruction is a model of global trends, not a precise census of prehistory.
Even so, the central conclusion holds across a range of scenarios. Every language that disappears takes with it a distinct way of naming the world—and that loss began far earlier than we ever believed.
