Researchers at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Arizona say that between 2005 and 2019, the number of words we speak out loud to another human being fell by nearly 28 percent. And that has likely only gotten worse following the pandemic.
The researchers actually counted the number of words we were speaking on average (16,632 in 2005). They looked at data from 22 studies in which over 2,000 people recorded audio of their daily lives. Over time, as ordering through apps became the norm, texting increased, and our lives became increasingly online, they found that number had dropped dramatically. By 2019, we were only speaking about 11,900 words per day.
As the Wall Street Journal notes, there is concern about the psychological effects of reduced human interaction. And it’s not just about the loneliness epidemic, or the risks of falling down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole, people are also losing basic conversational skills, according to the authors of the study, like how to not interrupt people.
The researchers did find that younger people were more susceptible, but only slightly. People under 25 spoke 451 words fewer a day per year, while those over 25 lost 314 words a day. On average, the number of words people spoke daily fell by 338 per year. If that trend kept up in the ensuing years, we could be speaking fewer than 10,000 words per day now.
Though alarming, Valerie Fridland, a linguistics professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, told the Wall Street Journal there’s no need to panic just yet. Small changes could help reverse things, like parents talking to their babies more, getting a landline, and maybe putting the smartphone down for a bit during the day.