The New Indian Express ·
Back to the future with memes
The world is becoming flatter. So says a paper published in Science by researchers in Barcelona, New Haven and Leipzig―‘The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene’. Using ethnolinguistic data and population estimates in a Bayesian model, they find that languages have dwindled through the Holocene—the planet’s current era, sometimes called the Anthropocene to help the human race feel important―except for a surprising surge about 2,000 years long.
The human race now speaks about 7,500 languages, not many more than the 4,500-6,200 which are presumed to have been in circulation shortly after humans amazed each other by speaking up for the first time. But the study also finds that the period 3,000-1,000 years ago was linguistically splendid, when perhaps tens of thousands of languages flourished.
This linguistic boom, hitherto unsuspected, could be contemporary with the growth of settled living following the development of agriculture and animal husbandry. But the connection between the agricultural revolution and settlements is no longer canonical dogma, and other factors could have fed the growth of languages. The paper also contests the popular idea that the European age of exploration began the destruction of languages through commercial dominance, warfare and by handing out infected blankets to the people they ‘discovered’.
