WASHINGTON – Globally, people currently use roughly 7,500 languages, with English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic and French being the most common, counting native and nonnative speakers. That is a lot of languages.

But it is a far cry from the peak number historically.

Researchers used mathematical modeling and insights from anthropology, linguistics and demography to estimate the number of languages used globally dating back about 12,000 years to around the end of the last Ice Age, covering a chapter in time called the Holocene epoch. They identified a period spanning the first millennium B.C. and first millennium A.D. when humankind may have spoken tens of thousands of different languages.