What do we know about the impact on our social lives and why a simple conversation can have more value than we imagine? How many words do we utter each day? How many times do we call, instead of sending a text message? How many conversations do we have with people we meet on the street, at the neighborhood coffee shop or at our workplace? And how many times do we choose the speed of a written response over a human voice? These seemingly insignificant choices add up to a significant difference in our daily lives.
A new scientific study revealed by BBC Science Focus suggests that people are talking less and less, recording a dramatic decline in verbal communication over a period of 14 years. The discovery is striking: on average, the number of words we utter each day has decreased by around 338 with each passing year. The study analyzed speech behavior from 2005 to 2019.
However, as noted, this decline does not mean that words are disappearing from our languages, nor that people are necessarily losing their vocabulary. It is about something else: words that we no longer say out loud, because more and more everyday communication is carried out in other ways or not at all.
The study that documented the decline of everyday speech
The research by Valeria A. Pfeifer, from the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and Matthias R. Mehl, from the University of Arizona, was published in 2026 in the scientific journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, titled “Sliding Towards Silence? We Are Speaking 300 Fewer Daily Words Every Year.”
The researchers analyzed data from 22 studies, which included a total of 2,197 people, aged 10 to 94. The participants were mainly from the United States, but also from Mexico, Europe and Australia.
A particularly interesting element of the methodology was the use of audio recordings from the participants' daily lives. In this way, the scientists attempted to estimate how many words people used in their real daily lives, rather than exclusively in laboratory conditions or in questionnaire responses. According to the published analysis, the estimated average was about 12,792 spoken words per day. In a previous study in 2007, the corresponding estimate was 15,959 words per day.
The researchers found that, over the period 2005–2019, the number of words spoken each day decreased by about 338 for each additional year. The overall decline was estimated at about 28%. Multiplying 338 words by 365 days gives more than 123,000 fewer words spoken per year for each year of change described by this trend.
This is a number that helps us understand the magnitude of the change. However, an important clarification is needed: this does not mean that every person speaks 123,000 fewer words today than last year. This is a statistical estimate of the average annual trend in this specific sample and in this specific historical period. ©LAPSI.al
