Researchers found people spoke 28% fewer words daily between 2005 and 2019, falling from 16,632 to 11,900.
When was the last time you engaged in friendly banter with your barista, chatted with your neighbor or called your mother?
Chances are, you placed your latte order on an app and ignored your neighbor when you pulled into your driveway. Your mom? She likely had to settle for a text.
Digital interactions are replacing face-to-face interactions with loved ones and strangers. And the rise of AirPods means we're all tuned into our own little worlds, appearing unapproachable for conversation.
The result: We're speaking much less than we did a decade ago. Yes, someone counted our daily words.
In 2005, we spoke about 16,632 words every day. By 2019, that number had fallen to 11,900, according to researchers at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Arizona. All told, our speaking decreased about 28% in that time period. And it's very likely that loss has widened in the years following the pandemic, say those researchers.
In the course of a year, at least 120,000 words we each might have once said now go unspoken.
As people retreat into online spaces, loneliness could become an even greater problem, psychologists fear. And speaking less could lead to a decline in the cognitive chess game that is conversation, especially for infants whose mothers are speaking to them less.
Talking requires you to pay attention to what the other person is saying, formulate a response and control your physical reaction, all within about 200 milliseconds, says Valeria Pfeifer, assistant professor of psychology and counseling at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
"Talking to people builds skills like learning when to speak and when not to -- and how to interject," says Pfeifer, who is co-author of the study.
Pfeifer and her fellow researcher had set out to study gender differences in talkativeness when they discovered that people were speaking less overall. They reviewed 22 studies in which more than 2,000 mostly U.S. participants recorded audio of their daily lives. The people ranged in age from 10 to 94.
The researchers wondered whether the phenomenon was driven by younger people, so they divided the sample. The difference was slight but noticeable: Each year, people under 25 lost an average of 451 words a day, while those older than 25 lost 314 words a day.
Technology use could explain the difference between age groups, Pfeifer says, but the fact that older adults also have been speaking less suggests that fundamental shifts in how we live could also play a role. Fewer multigenerational households, declining community and religious engagement, even self-checkout lanes at the grocery store, all mean fewer opportunities to talk to relatives and strangers, Pfeifer says.
And texting might be just one of the ways our smartphones are affecting our chattiness: Our shortened attention spans might also make it harder to hold a conversation. Pfeifer considers the flip side, too: "It's possible our attention span is decreasing because we're having fewer conversations."
Since the study ends in 2019, Pfeifer and others would like to research the more recent past, too, once more recordings are available. They bet that the pandemic and generative AI are causing us to lose even more spoken words.
The implications for future generations are troubling. Studies also show parents don't talk to their babies as much as they used to, largely because they're on their phones.
Kaya de Barbaro, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, analyzed families with babies, synchronizing home audio recordings with the mothers’ smartphone use. When the moms were using their phones, they spoke 16% fewer words to their infants. Research says the more words parents speak to their babies, the bigger vocabulary they build and the better they do in school.
If the rate of speaking decline continues, will we eventually be a silent society?
Valerie Fridland, a linguistics professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, says that while the study was well done, more data should be collected over time before we get too worked up about it.
She says there is reason to be hopeful, including movements among parents to delay kids’ smartphone use -- and in some cases, go back to landlines -- and the push to restrict smartphone use in schools.
She and other experts say people don’t have to go out of their way to increase the number of words they say each day. De Barbaro recommends parents narrate what they’re doing and point things out when they’re with their babies.
"If each of us just talked to one more person each day, we could reverse this trend," Pfeifer says.