{"id":1717,"date":"2026-07-23T21:20:03","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T21:20:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/2026\/07\/23\/exploring-the-lost-golden-age-of-language-diversity-before-expanding-empires-drove-a-global-decline\/"},"modified":"2026-07-23T21:20:03","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T21:20:03","slug":"exploring-the-lost-golden-age-of-language-diversity-before-expanding-empires-drove-a-global-decline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/2026\/07\/23\/exploring-the-lost-golden-age-of-language-diversity-before-expanding-empires-drove-a-global-decline\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploring the lost golden age of language diversity before expanding empires drove a global decline"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today, people speak or sign around 7,500 languages. Yet this figure provides only a snapshot of a constantly changing history. How many languages existed before written records? Did agriculture reduce linguistic diversity by allowing expanding farming populations to replace smaller hunter-gatherer groups? Or did population growth initially create more opportunities for new languages to emerge?<\/p>\n<p class=\"bkbc-attribution\">Originally published at <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2026-07-exploring-lost-golden-age-language.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">phys.org<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"bkbc-source\">Source: <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Phys.org &#8211; latest science and technology news stories<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today, people speak or sign around 7,500 languages. Yet this figure provides only a snapshot of a constantly changing history. How many languages existed before [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1718,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1717\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}