But today’s linguistic diversity may be only the shadow of a time when humans conversed in 10 times as many tongues. During that brief “golden age,” as the authors put it, the number of languages soared into the tens of thousands. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. To trace the path of linguistic diversity from that moment to the present, Blasi and his colleagues computationally modeled thousands of possible trajectories. “It takes much less than a colonial powerhouse to destroy linguistic diversity,” Blasi says.