The natural history of linguistic diversity

Damián Blasi, ICREA Research Professor at the Center for Brain & Cognition, Pompeu Fabra University, explains why linguistic diversity matters for understanding language, history, culture and the mind. The conversation covers how languages are counted and how they vary, a reconstruction of the rise and fall of human linguistic diversity over the past 12,000 years, the drivers of language change, and how cognitive science’s reliance on English and English speakers may hold the field back.