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 name "blue" as "orange" and cause no confusion ... except for the increasingly niche application of meat speaking directly to meat.

This could help us keep up with accelerating language creation of digital communities, that adapt daily meme by meme. They could interact in their radically concise lingo, while the babel fish expands it as necessary for noobs.

How fast might a specialty language evolve if changes are no longer a barrier to understanding?

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.

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

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.

• pessimizer

  today at 8:44 PM

  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.

• didsomeonesay

  today at 7:40 PM

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

• nine_k

  today at 8:03 PM

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

• gmuslera

  today at 5:47 PM

  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.

  • Retric

    today at 8:13 PM

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

• wannabe44

  today at 7:48 PM

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