They say the art of conversation is dead – and psychologists have found we now speak about 20 per cent fewer words every day than we did two decades ago.
We are losing more than 300 words from our daily conversations every day – equivalent to 120,000 words a year, a study reveals.
The biggest decline is among Gen Z, with major implications for the loneliness epidemic and how we communicate in the future, especially with the rise of AI.
Academics suggest that increases in email, texting and social media may be responsible but say there are also other unexplained factors.
The researchers say: ‘This loss of words reflects real spoken conversations, big ones and small ones, that we stopped having with others. It is imperative that we apply our best science to understand these slow, societal-level changes affecting our lives, especially because speaking 300 additional daily words may offer each person a trivial way to counter their personal level of isolation and thereby affect our ongoing epidemic of loneliness.
‘Three hundred words a day could be a brief conversation with a neighbour, a joke told to loved ones.’
The study analysed data on daily spoken words taken from a global sample of 2,197 men and women aged ten to 90 based on an analysis of audio recordings. The results were then compared with a 2007 study that used the same methods.
In the later study, the average number of daily words spoken was 12,792, compared with 15,959 in 2007, a decline of 20 per cent.
The American researchers then looked at each year up to 2019 and found that the number of words spoken dropped by an average of 338 every day.
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Each year, they say, we speak 120,000 fewer words than in the previous year.
Researchers found that the under-25s lost 44 per cent more words than older men and women.
Writing in Perspectives On Psychological Science, the academics from the universities of Arizona and Missouri said: ‘When we speak less, we connect less.
‘This loss is alarming because we are already in the middle of a loneliness epidemic in which social isolation and a loss of connection to others have become a problem.’
Sir Cary Cooper, professor of psychology at Manchester University, said: ‘We are using fewer spoken words, especially young people.
‘It is not only digital technology. Social connections are changing too. We have less face-to-face contact.
‘But we need eye-to-eye contact. Life is about communicating, and it is good for our psychological health.
‘The future doesn’t look too bright. In ten years’ time, Generation Z will be talking less, have smaller vocabularies, and AI will be doing the thinking and innovating for them.’
