Researchers at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Arizona have crunched the numbers, and the verdict is in: between 2005 and 2019, the number of words we speak out loud to another human being fell by nearly 28 percent. And if you thought the pandemic helped things, well, it likely made it worse.
The researchers actually counted our daily verbal output - 16,632 words in 2005, based on data from 22 studies involving over 2,000 people who recorded audio of their daily lives. By 2019, that number had dropped to about 11,900 words per day, as ordering through apps became the norm, texting exploded, and our lives migrated online.
As the Wall Street Journal notes, there's concern about the psychological effects of reduced human interaction. It's not just about the loneliness epidemic or the risk of falling down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole - people are also losing basic conversational skills, according to the study's authors, like how to not interrupt people.
The researchers found that younger people were more susceptible, but only slightly. Those under 25 spoke 451 fewer words per day per year, while those over 25 lost 314 words per day. On average, daily word output fell by 338 words per year. If that trend continued, we could now be speaking fewer than 10,000 words per day.
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 - just maybe - putting the smartphone down for a bit during the day.