We’re Losing 338 Words a Day
The following article comes from BBC Science Focus Magazine and is authored by Hatty Willmoth, trends editor at BBC Science Focus. Previously, she wrote for Newsweek, The Independent, and Live Science, among other publications, and has experience writing about health, nutrition, and food. Hatty is a member of the News Associates National College of Journalism (NCTJ) and holds a master’s degree in History from the University of Cambridge.
We’ve Been Talking Less Since 2005
Spoken language is in decline, according to new research from the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) and the University of Arizona.
Psychologists found that, since 2005, the average person has spoken less each year than the year before—approximately 338 fewer words per day.
This equates to an annual loss of around 120,000 words per person, representing thousands of lost human interactions.
“Small changes in daily behavior accumulate over time,” said Dr. Valeria Pfeifer, first author and assistant professor of linguistics and psychology at UMKC.
“A gradual decline in spoken conversation may not be obvious from day to day, but over the years, it could change the way people relate to one another.”
Overall, the scientists found a 28% decrease in the number of words spoken between 2005 and 2019.
“Talking less means spending less time connecting with others,” Pfeifer explained. “If people are having fewer conversations, they may be missing out on both the immediate emotional benefits of social interaction and the long-term benefits of maintaining strong relationships.”
Pfeifer and co-author Professor Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona, reached these conclusions after analyzing data from 22 studies, collected over 14 years in the United States, Europe, and Australia.
As part of these studies, scientists recorded audio data from more than 2,000 people, aged 10 to 94, as they went about their daily activities.
Even small interactions can make a cumulative difference in the number of daily conversations, explained Pfeifer, such as chatting with baristas, shopkeepers, and other strangers.
Pfeifer stated that the study could not determine the reason for the decline in oral communication, but noted that the period analyzed (from 2005 to 2019) coincided with the rise of text messaging, email, and social media, so some of the lost conversations may now be taking place digitally.
«Whether written conversations offer the same social benefits as oral conversations is an open question that future research should address,» she concluded.
The study also revealed some variation by age. While all age groups were affected, participants aged 25 and younger showed a markedly more pronounced decline in speech, possibly related to their greater use of technology.
Scientists have yet to uncover all the implications of digital communication and our growing reliance on text and emojis instead of tone of voice, the rhythm of conversation, and emotional cues.
Pfeifer stated, “Humans have relied on spoken language for over 200,000 years, and we still don’t know if the shift to more digital communication comes at a social cost.
Our findings highlight the need to better understand how oral and written communication affect loneliness, health, and well-being.”
The Decline of Daily Dialogue
The following contribution comes from Psychology Today, which defines itself as follows: the world’s largest online portal for mental health and behavioral science. It is the original and largest publisher dedicated exclusively to human behavior. Our motto is “We’re here to help,” and the resources you access are the world’s leading source of specialized information on psychology and mental health.
PsychologyToday.com is the world’s largest psychotherapy portal, offering free access to hundreds of thousands of professionals. While Psychology Today has expanded its mission and reach across decades and continents, we continue to enjoy satisfying humanity’s innate curiosity about our favorite subject: ourselves.
The author is Laura Visu-Petra, PhD, coordinator of the Research Laboratory on Individual Differences and Legal Psychology (RIDDLE) and the Master’s Program in Legal Psychology at the Department of Psychology, Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania. Her initial studies focused on the typical and atypical development of cognitive control mechanisms throughout life, with the aim of developing training programs and improving academic performance. Later, she became interested in how social and emotional factors affect cognition, with particular attention to the development of deceptive behaviors related to problematic behaviors in children and the general population, as well as in populations facing adversity (e.g., prisoners, refugees). Her main interest lies in how individual differences in «positive» or «negative» personality traits foster prosocial or antisocial behaviors, based on authenticity or processes of self-deception.
What happens to the 338 words we «lose» each year?
A recent article published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, with the unsettling title «Are We Slipping into Silence? We Speak 300 Fewer Words Each Year,» generated several alarming headlines by showing that daily conversations have experienced a steady decline from 2005 to 2018, decreasing by approximately 300 words per day each year, with an even steeper drop among those under 25. This conclusion was derived from the meticulous monitoring of audio data recorded from over 2,000 people, aged 10 to 94, as they went about their daily activities.
However, beyond a strictly quantitative approach, should we be concerned about the observed trend of an annual loss of spoken words? What are the consequences for human thought and interaction?
This concern is neither entirely new nor without dire consequences.
This was already foreshadowed in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, where, programmatically and intentionally, he played a fundamental role in the compilation of the Newspeak Dictionary, which would reform the language (and the thinking) of the inhabitants of Oceania:
We are destroying words: dozens, hundreds of them, every day. We are reducing language to its bare minimum… It is a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. […] Do you not see that the aim of Newspeak is to limit the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words to express it. Every concept that may be needed will be expressed by a single word, the meaning of which will be rigidly defined and whose secondary meanings will be blotted out and forgotten. Every year there will be fewer words and the scope of consciousness will be slightly reduced. The revolution will be complete when language is perfect.
The loss of nuance and complexity in language could stifle conflict and opposition by making critical thinking impossible.
However, it is highly unlikely that we are witnessing such a systematic effort. The decline in oral conversations appears to be a natural consequence (or a catalyst) of the changes in interpersonal communication that we have observed over several decades.
The most obvious explanation, mentioned by the authors, is that the communicative environment has simply shifted from face-to-face to online communication. We talk less, but we send more text messages. In a 2021 study, participants in a field experiment were asked to contact an old friend by phone or email. Other participants in the lab were invited to converse with a stranger via video, voice, or text.
The results indicated that interactions involving voice (phone, video call, and voice chat) created stronger social bonds and did not generate greater discomfort compared to interactions involving text (email, chat). However, a crucial finding was that misguided expectations about discomfort or connection led to what the authors termed «suboptimal preferences for text-based communication.» If we expect direct interactions to be uncomfortable—a term adopted by Gen Z and Millennials in response to embarrassment or social awkwardness—we can avoid anticipated social discomfort by preferring a more indirect environment.
Scene from Komi Can’t Communicate
This may explain the popularity of the manga Komi Can’t Communicate, which tells the story of a girl with a non-specific communication disorder who is encouraged by her classmate to make 100 friends and improve her communication skills. At first, they only manage to exchange messages by writing them on the whiteboard: a simpler and less stressful form of interaction than verbal communication. Many teenagers today claim to prefer text-based environments to face-to-face interactions.
However, texting may not engage us as much in the act of communicating as verbal interaction.
One study compared daughters who sent instant messages to their mothers after a stressful situation with those who called them. Surprisingly, in the case of the former, their salivary cortisol levels remained as high as those of the control subjects who did not interact with their parents. Furthermore, their hormonal responses (oxytocin release) only manifested in direct verbal conversations with their mothers, not during text messages. When analyzing the verbal content exchanged, the mothers in both groups showed the same support and expressiveness. The words weren’t lost or made more distant in written communication, but they had less of an (biological) impact compared to comforting words spoken aloud.
Finally, one hopeful explanation is that what is being reduced or eliminated in today’s impoverished communication is actually informal small talk, and that what remains is more authentic and deeper or more meaningful for those involved. The authors of the initial study allude to this possibility: «We have lost many small, incidental conversations: asking a cashier for help, asking a stranger for directions, chatting with a neighbor.» Are these lost, superficial interactions truly meaningful? Should we lament them?
A large-scale study published in Psychological Science showed that the happiest participants had twice as many genuine conversations
and a third less informal small talk than the least happy participants. This inspired behavioral scientists Kristen Berman and Dan Ariely to host a dinner party where small talk was literally banned and only meaningful conversations were allowed, although conversation topics and examples of dialogue were provided. Supposedly, this made people feel much happier and more engaged. Another explanation is that it might have relieved them of the burden of finding common ground and offered exotic and unusual topics (from suicide prevention to «the art of the dominatrix») that bridged the conversations of a pre-selected group of people brought together by curiosity. But do we always need such fascinating topics to enjoy and benefit from conversations?
Once again, demonstrating an anticipation error, we might underestimate the power (and pleasure) of small talk.
In a recent series of nine experiments with 1,800 participants, researchers found that people consistently underestimated how interesting and enjoyable conversations about boring topics would be, from World War I to the stock market to vegan diets. Across the experiments, a clear pattern emerged: people expected the conversations to be quite dull, but then reported enjoying them far more than anticipated, even when both parties agreed the topic was indeed boring. Once we start communicating, the power of the interaction can outweigh the importance and relevance of the topic. We simply need to start talking, one way or another.
Are We Talking Less? Questions and Answers with Psychologist Matthias Mehl
The following contribution comes from the University of Arizona website and is authored by Niranjana Rajalakshmi, who handles university communications.
The study suggests that people lose 338 words a year, and this has been the case for at least a decade and a half. These 338 words don’t represent a long conversation we’ve stopped having, but rather are distributed in small moments throughout the day, explained Matthias Mehl.
In a society increasingly marked by self-checkouts, GPS navigation, and touchscreen ordering kiosks, new research shows that face-to-face conversation may be quietly disappearing. A new study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science suggests that people lose 338 words a year, and this has been the case for at least a decade and a half.
Matthias Mehl, a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, has dedicated his career to studying how people communicate in everyday life. When he set out to replicate his influential 2007 Science article on gender differences in talkativeness, the results pointed to something he hadn’t been looking for: a steady decline, over the years, in the number of words people speak daily.
For this study, Mehl collaborated with Valeria Pfeifer, an assistant professor of psychology and counseling at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the study’s first author. Mehl spoke with the University of Arizona newspaper about this serendipitous discovery, its implications for social connection, and why losing a few hundred words a day each year is more significant than it might seem.
Q: How did this finding come about? Was it something you had set out to study?
A: Not at all. We were replicating a previous article on gender differences in the number of words men and women speak daily. My colleague, Valeria Pfeifer, presented me with the word counts from the replication analyses, using the same methodology as our 2007 article, but with 2,200 new participants in 22 studies. Our estimate of the average daily words spoken was approximately 12,700. Our 2007 estimate had been 15,900. I told her there had to be a mistake. But she checked everything, and the figure held. Something had indeed changed.
Q: How did you confirm that this was a real trend?
A: We conducted 22 studies between 2005 and 2019 with approximately 2,200 participants in total. By plotting the daily word counts against the year each study was conducted, we found a consistent linear decline. Each year, the estimated number of words spoken daily decreased by 338. This is how it fell from approximately 16,000 in 2005 to about 12,700 in 2019. Speaking 338 fewer words each day equates to more than 120,000 fewer words per year.
Q: What kind of studies were these? Did they all measure the same thing?
A: No, and that’s important. These studies were conducted for entirely different purposes: coping with breast cancer, adjusting after a divorce, the social effects of meditation, relationship dynamics. None of them were designed to record the number of words people speak over time. Participants had no idea their word count would be analyzed in this way, which rules out any concerns that they might adjust their behavior to fit a hypothesis.
Q: What specifically is causing the decline in spoken words?
A: People immediately turn to social media and smartphones, and that certainly plays a role. When the sample was divided by age (under 25 versus over 25), young adults showed a steeper decline, about 452 words per year, compared to 314 for older adults. However, older adults are also experiencing a decline, which points to a broader phenomenon. We’ve lost many brief, informal conversations: asking a cashier for help, asking a stranger for directions, chatting with a neighbor.
Q: Could texting and social media be compensating for the loss of spoken words?
A: Possibly, in terms of raw output. The total word count across all channels may not have decreased, and may even have increased. But that’s a separate question from whether it allows us to remain socially whole. Spoken words convey something that written words often lack: presence, tone, the spontaneity of a real exchange. Whether people who text more but speak less are socially better off is something research has yet to resolve. I don’t think we can assume the two are interchangeable.
