Humanity spoke thousands of languages at the dawn of farming — now many of them are lost

TL;DR - A Nature report suggests that the transition from nomadic life to farming initially increased linguistic diversity, followed by a rapid decline that erased many languages. The provided excerpt does not specify the study’s methods or quantitative findings.

• Early farming communities might have contributed to the emergence of thousands of languages.
• Linguistic diversity reportedly contracted rapidly after this initial expansion.
• The work connects shifts in subsistence and settlement patterns with long-term language evolution.