Frequent commenter Y wrote me as follows:Two interesting bits. […]:Has there ever been work in something like documentary linguistics that was not downstream of the European missionary–colonial tradition? We find occasional snippets about foreigners’ languages for long time (Greeks writing down a handful of words of Scythian, etc. The gist of the article is that there was a peak in global language diversity around 2000 years ago. You can learn more about it from the accessible supplementary materials; also from an older article it’s based on, and from secondary coverage:The lost golden age of language diversityStudy uncovers lost ‘golden age’ of languages