What we're losing by talking less

FROM 2005 TO 2019, THE NUMBER OF WORDS THE AVER-age person uttered in a day fell by 28%, according to a recent study from a team of U.S.-based researchers.

- MARKHAM HEID

“We estimated the difference at about 330 fewer words spoken per day for each year during that time period,” says Matthias Mehl, a professor of social psychology at the University of Arizona. That’s roughly 120,000 fewer words spoken during the course of a year. “It’s a substantial loss.”

The finding came about when Mehl, working alongside Valeria Pfeifer of the University of Missouri–Kansas City, analyzed audio recordings collected from more than 2,000 people, mostly Americans. Those audio samples, gathered as people went about their daily lives, revealed that while the average person uttered about 16,600 words per day back in 2005, that figure had plummeted to below 12,000 words in 2019.

“At first I said, ‘That can’t be right. We need to go back and check the data again,’” Mehl recalls. But after verifying the figures, he and his colleagues found that the drop in spoken communication was not only real, but had progressed steadily each year for 15 years for which they had data. They did not examine the causes, but Mehl speculates modern information technologies have played a large role.