People are speaking less than they used to, and it is not just a feeling. A new study found that between 2005 and 2019, the number of words people spoke aloud fell by nearly 28%. According to the study, the average decline was 338 fewer spoken words a day, dropping from about 16,000 words a day in the mid-2000s to about 12,000 by the end of the last decade.
The study, published in the academic journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, was conducted by Dr. Valeria Pfeifer of the Department of Psychology and Counseling at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Prof. Matthias R. Mehl of the Department of Psychology at the University of Arizona.
The researchers reanalyzed audio data from 22 different studies conducted between 2005 and 2019, involving about 2,200 participants ages 10 to 94 from the United States, Europe and Australia. Participants carried recording devices that captured snippets of their daily lives, and the researchers calculated how many words were actually spoken during the day.
Importantly, the recordings were not originally intended to examine whether people were speaking less. They focused on various subjects, including coping with breast cancer, adjustment after divorce, meditation and relationship dynamics. As a result, the researchers said, participants did not know their word counts would later be used to examine a broader social trend.
The discovery itself was almost accidental. Mehl told the University of Arizona that he and Pfeifer were trying to replicate his earlier 2007 study, which examined whether women really talk more than men. But instead of finding only a gender difference, they discovered a consistent overall decline in daily speech.
“I said there must be a mistake,” Mehl said of the moment he received the new data, asking his research partner to check the numbers. “She checked everything again, and the number remained. Something really had changed.”
The decline was evident across all age groups, but it was sharper among young people. According to the researchers, people under 25 lost an average of about 451 to 452 spoken words a day each year, compared with about 314 words among those 25 and older. Still, the decline among adults suggests the story is not simply “young people and smartphones,” but a broader shift in lifestyle habits.
The researchers do not claim the study proves what caused the decline, but they point to a period in which nearly every mechanism of daily communication changed: text messages, emails, social media, app-based ordering, self-checkout machines, using phone navigation instead of asking someone on the street, and ordering coffee through an app instead of having a brief exchange with a barista.
Pfeifer stressed that even small interactions, such as speaking with a salesperson, waiter or stranger, add up to a significant amount of speech over the course of a day.
If the trend continued after the study period ended in 2019, people may now speak fewer than 10,000 words a day on average. The researchers do not have data after 2019, but Mehl said he would not bet on improvement since then because the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated processes that had already pushed people farther apart.
Beyond the numbers, the study’s main significance is social and psychological.
“Talking less means spending less time in connection with others,” Pfeifer told BBC Science Focus. “If people are having fewer conversations, they may also lose the immediate emotional benefits of social interaction and the long-term benefits of maintaining strong relationships.”
She said it remains unclear whether typed conversations provide the same benefits as spoken ones, a question future studies will need to examine.
Mehl made a similar point: The total number of words people produce across all channels may not have declined and may even have increased, but that is not the same question. Spoken words involve presence, tone, spontaneity and the timing of real-time exchange, elements that are difficult to reproduce in written messages.
“I don’t think we can assume the two are interchangeable,” he said.
The initial information was received from Alchemiq’s news analysis system.