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Three Millennia Ago, Humans May Have Spoken Thousands More Languages Than We Have Today, During a Linguistic 'Golden Age' (www.smithsonianmag.com)

submitted 8 hours ago by cm0002@mander.xyz to c/science@mander.xyz

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[–] I_am_10_squirrels@beehaw.org 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

While I agree that many more languages existed in the past, I have a hard time believing that it was an order of magnitude more. New languages evolve from population drift, they're not just invented because someone is bored (with some exceptions).

[–] Fribbizz@feddit.org 5 points 5 hours ago

But it very much depends on what you count as a language. German used to be a dialect continuum. People could understand their neighbors and a village or two over, but became mutually unintelligible pretty quickly. Transportation was slow, so populations just didn't mix as much and language was more local. Latin used to mostly be the language of a single city.