The Quiet Crisis: We're Speaking 338 Fewer Words In Our Daily Lives Each Year

Two psychologists from the University of Arizona and the University of Missouri–Kansas City set out to uncover how many words people utter each day, drawing on data from 22 studies involving over 2,200 people, primarily from the US, with a few from Europe, Australia, and Mexico.

These studies were not specifically designed to measure how much people talk day to day. Instead, they focused on topics like coping with breast cancer, adjustment after divorce, the social effects of meditation, and relationship dynamics. However, from this wealth of information, the researchers were able to extract meaningful data about how much participants spoke each day.

They found that people tended to speak around 16,000 words daily in 2005, whether that was chatting with loved ones, discussing the previous night's TV with colleagues, or exchanging small talk at the supermarket checkout.

Each year after that, a small but steady decline emerged, with an average of 338 fewer words spoken per day annually. By 2019, that amounted to people speaking a mere 12,700 words each day. 

“As trivial as 338 words a day may feel, the loss of these daily spoken words unavoidably adds up,” the paper reads.

“It means that, each year, we speak more than 120,000 words fewer than in the previous year. From 2005 to 2019, the reduction in the estimated number of words spoken per day was about 28 percent. This loss of words reflects real spoken conversations, big ones and small ones, that we stopped having with others,” it adds. 

The decline was sharpest among younger people. Those under 25 lost around 452 words per year, compared to 314 for adults aged 25 and over.

The researchers say that the rise of social media explains a large part of the problem, but it doesn’t totally explain the trend. In general, day-to-day social interactions might be becoming scarcer; to order a takeaway, you tap an app rather than call the restaurant, for instance. To ask for directions, you open Maps rather than stopping someone on the street.

It's also worth noting that the study drew only on data from "Western" countries, known for their individualistic cultures and high rates of technology adoption. It’s very likely, the researchers say, that many non-Western cultures are not witnessing the same declines in verbal communication.

“We didn't have data from more collectivistic cultures, so I wouldn't extend these findings globally. My sense, from observation, is that the kind of casual, incidental interaction we seem to be losing still comes more naturally in other parts of the world. But I can't say that with data,” Professor Matthias Mehl, the study author from the University of Arizona, said in a statement.

The big question is what this means for our health, happiness, and wellbeing. Humans are masters of conversation. As deeply social creatures, we thrive on the little quirks of speech – certain inflections, subtle nuances, the warmth of a voice. Can a lively exchange in the comments section ever replace a genuine "how's your day going?" at the local pub? Although there’s no hard data on this, the researchers are doubtful.

“If pressed for an opinion, we, as psychologists, would argue that spoken, ‘live’ conversations involve different social and cognitive processes than typed conversations and that such live conversations can elicit benefits in well-being that apps and social media cannot readily replace,” the study authors write in their paper.

"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 individual person a trivial way to counter their personal level of isolation and thereby affect our ongoing epidemic of loneliness," they added.

"To avoid sliding into silence, we must act now to gain back some of those 300 words we, just last year, still spoke to our fellow humans," the paper concludes. 

The study is published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.