In a new paper recently published at Perspectives on Psychological Science from the Language and Cognition Lab (Pfeifer & Mehl, 2026) we investigated the amount of words people speak on a daily basis. Our work shows that from 2005-2019, a decline of about -338 daily spoken words occurred each year, with accumulates to a total loss of spoken words by ~28%.
Read the UMKC press release here: https://www.umkc.edu/news/posts/2026/march/are-we-talking-less-than-we-used-to.html
and the journal article here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916261425131