What a coincidence I was just recently wondering when in history had the most distinct languages spoken. This peak described here is later than what I remember reading.

> Great loss of linguistic diversity did not begin with recent colonial expansion but as multinational empires first spread along with their languages, pathogens, and cultures.

Insert "they're the same picture" meme here.

I envy (or maybe feel for) the longevity of those who see the Mongol Empire, the Roman Empire, the Babylonian Empire as recent events.

They're not the same. "recent" and "first" are doing a lot of work in the quoted sentence.

Guns, Germs and Steel in cultural terms?

Still, the guns (or in general, weapons) part was important, centuries of in practice isolation eventually gives you a different language, until an invader wipes your population, culture and language because it wants more resources and new territories for expansion over slaves that can't understand them (or germs finishing the work anyway).

Low granularity on data over long periods doesn't help there, with history, written word and then mass printing not only you get better records, but also you get a pressure for normalization and loss of language diversity.

A colony is a specific thing. It isn't like London colonized the north of England, or Paris colonized France, but the power of those cities resulted in a loss of linguistic diversity in the region.

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