The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene

Posted by delichon 14 hours ago

Counter61Comment15OpenOriginal

Comments

Comment by snovymgodym 10 hours ago

It makes sense.

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.

Comment by delichon 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by onlypassingthru 4 hours ago

>How fast might a specialty language evolve

Pretty fast, actually. At least if you leave it up to kids.†

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

Comment by pegasus 9 hours ago

Human languages aren't just a set of more or less arbitrary conventions relating groups of sounds with meanings. Language is probably humanity's greatest and most advanced technology, making most of the other ones possible. And it's also art and play, a repository of original wisdom encoded in the various etymologies. It steers thinking down certain pathways in ways which are hard to even point to - because it would be a bit like the finger trying to point at itself. They are collectively created artifacts which encode the wisdom of generations. The deeper, wider and more diverse that pool, the more powerful the product. A human language invented by one person or by a group of people cannot ever compare in depth and richness to the languages most people use to communicate and think.

Comment by delichon 9 hours ago

Mighty rivers start as a trickle. Enough trickles and fetch happens.

Comment by nkrisc 9 hours ago

But why would anyone want that? Having interpersonal communication gated behind some translation technology is some dystopian nightmare.

Comment by svl7 10 hours ago

Reminds me of this possible development: https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3576

Comment by nullsanity 8 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by dnnehgf 6 hours ago

fortunately the scientific method is here to defibrillate this flattening line with a pulse of Original Chaos.

Comment by bcatanzaro 10 hours ago

Something poignant about the knowledge in this paper staying lost behind a paywall.

Comment by HappyPanacea 13 hours ago

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.

Insert "they're the same picture" meme here.

Comment by gmuslera 13 hours ago

Guns, Germs and Steel in cultural terms?

Still, the guns (or in general, weapons) part was important, centuries of in practice isolation eventually gives you a different language, until an invader wipes your population, culture and language because it wants more resources and new territories for expansion over slaves that can't understand them (or germs finishing the work anyway).

Low granularity on data over long periods doesn't help there, with history, written word and then mass printing not only you get better records, but also you get a pressure for normalization and loss of language diversity.

Comment by Retric 10 hours ago

It’s not limited to conquest, migration takes a heavy toll on languages spoken by a small number of people.

Comment by nine_k 10 hours ago

I envy (or maybe feel for) the longevity of those who see the Mongol Empire, the Roman Empire, the Babylonian Empire as recent events.

Comment by didsomeonesay 11 hours ago

They're not the same. "recent" and "first" are doing a lot of work in the quoted sentence.

Comment by pessimizer 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by wannabe44 11 hours ago

[dead]