语言多样性的黄金时代：兴衰与消亡

Some 7,500 languages are spoken or signed around the world today. That might sound like a lot, but the number could have been up to 10 times as high a few thousand years ago, researchers report in Science. “That was the golden age of linguistic diversity,” says linguist Claire Bowern of Yale University. The finding comes as scientists are racing to document, and ideally preserve, languages nearing extinction. Half of today’s languages are now endangered, and roughly four languages disappear every year. Researchers have long sought to identify features of language, whether unique to a given culture or universal, to generate theories on how humans reason about the world. …