The Golden Age of Tongues

It is an easy mistake to assume the modern world is a homogenized outlier, and that deeper into the human past, the planet was an untamed tapestry of countless isolated tongues. The reality is quite the opposite. The golden age of the world's linguistic diversity is not hidden in the remote Paleolithic era. It happened relatively recently.

At the start of the Holocene some 12,000 years ago, there were likely fewer languages spoken globally than exist today. Then came agriculture. As populations swelled and food production took root, the sheer demographic expansion created unprecedented opportunities for new languages to splinter off and thrive. This momentum carried global diversity to a striking peak between one and three thousand years ago.

Yet the very forces that allowed human populations to scale ultimately began to devour the linguistic landscape. The rise of multinational empires and expanding states introduced a relentless linguistic bottleneck. Smaller tongues were absorbed, sidelined, or actively erased. Crucially, this contraction predates the era of European colonialism by centuries; smaller-scale state expansion over the last thousand years was already more than sufficient to flatten the world's linguistic variety.

We tend to associate empires with the birth of great literature and administrative monuments, but their true ecological footprint may be counted in the quiet deaths of thousands of ways of speaking.