It starts with the small moments: the question for a cashier, the directions from a stranger, the word with a neighbor at the fence. Those little exchanges are disappearing, and researchers can now put a number on what families are losing. Analyzing more than a decade of recordings, teams at the University of Arizona together with the University of Missouri-Kansas City found the words we speak out loud to other people fell nearly 28 percent between 2005 and 2019. “We’ve lost a lot of small, incidental conversations: asking a cashier for help, getting directions from a stranger, chatting with a neighbor,” said Matthias Mehl, the Arizona psychology professor who led the analysis.
Behind the trend is plain arithmetic, gathered the patient way. The researchers pooled 22 studies covering about 2,200 mostly American participants aged 10 to 94 who wore devices recording parts of their days. Daily spoken words dropped from 15,900 words a day in 2007 to 12,700 in 2019, a loss of 338 words a day. Mehl’s tally: more than 120,000 words a year gone. The record stops at 2019, though he said he would be “surprised” if the trend had reversed.
For families, the human side is who is losing the words. Younger people are dropping more spoken words each year, yet older adults, many of them less glued to technology, showed a “clear decline in daily conversation,” too. “That suggests that age, or technology use alone, does not fully explain the trend,” said Valeria Pfeifer, the Missouri-Kansas City assistant professor who co-led the work. The researchers blame smartphones and social media in part, and believe and some conversation may simply have moved onto screens, perhaps even to AI chatbots. But something broader has shifted in how daily life is arranged.
The stakes are physical, not just sentimental. Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has warned of a loneliness epidemic, and the study’s authors connect quiet mouths to quiet lives. Everyday conversation, Pfeifer noted, lowers blood pressure and helps protect against depression and anxiety, themselves risk factors for dementia. Earlier University of Kansas research found that a single quality conversation a day is enough to do measurable good.
The encouraging part is that small habits cut both ways. “Humans have relied on spoken language for more than 200,000 years, and we do not yet know whether a shift toward more digital communication comes with social costs,” Pfeifer said. Her conclusion carries the gentle urgency of the whole finding: “Our findings highlight the need to better understand how both spoken and written communication affect loneliness, health and well-being.” Behind the breakthrough, in other words, is a modest invitation: say the words.
Sources
- Spoken language is dying as people say about 30% fewer words than 20 years ago: study
- We’re talking to each other less than we did a decade ago – and tech’s not all to blame | The Independent
