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.
A colony is a specific thing. It isn't like London colonized the north of England, or Paris colonized France, but the power of those cities resulted in a loss of linguistic diversity in the region.
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.
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.
Caveat: if you read the full text/supplementary materials, it becomes clear it's actually about ethnolinguistic groups, not languages. I doubt that all the languages were unintelligible to each other given that intelligibility is a continuum and the large estimate they postulate (maximum of 40k languages 1000-3000 years ago)
This is interesting, but I have substantial doubt as to how accurately this models the actual number of languages that existed at times in the distant past.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 34.9 ms ] thread> 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.
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.
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.