Anyone can try it today. We simply need to count, even just roughly, how many people we’ve actually spoken to—speaking to them, looking at them, or at least listening to them in person. And then count the number of people we’ve sent written messages to, whether by email, WhatsApp, or any other channel.
If the second number is greater than the first, the result should not surprise us: a recent study has confirmed that we are talking less and less.
A recorder in your pocket
How is it possible to know how many words someone speaks in a day? Asking that person directly wouldn’t be very accurate, of course, because it’s an extremely difficult calculation to make.
But more than 25 years ago, a team of psychologists at the University of Texas devised an ingenious solution: the electronic activation recorder (EAR). It’s a small device that a person can wear for several days and that, without them having to do anything, turns on for a few seconds every so often and captures ambient sound.
These audio samples can be analyzed afterward by a team of scientists to determine if the person was speaking and to count the words they uttered. Thus, with short samples distributed throughout the day, the total can be estimated. Today, the EAR system has evolved and is an application we can have on our own mobile phones, but the underlying idea remains the same.
This may bring to mind the suspicion that mobile phones or smart home speakers are listening to us, and the parallel is useful, albeit with two critical differences.
The first is that, with systems like EAR, the person has given their consent and can delete any part of it before submitting it. The second is that researchers aren’t interested in what a person says, but rather how much they talk and to how many people. To use an analogy, it could be understood as a pedometer for conversation, counting verbal steps (words) without judging where we’re walking.
And precisely because these systems have been used in numerous studies for more than two decades, it is now possible to observe whether our way of speaking has changed over the years.
A surprise that leaves us speechless
The authors of a recent study decided to review data from several studies conducted over more than a decade with EAR systems, with more than 2,000 participants of different ages whose ambient audio from their daily lives had been recorded.
When counting the words, something didn’t add up. The average across all the studies was about 12,800 words spoken per day, clearly below the almost 16,000 that the same method had estimated in a study published in Science in 2007 .
After confirming it wasn’t a calculation error, the scientists explored how the number of words spoken per day had changed over the years, and the result was surprising. Between 2005 and 2019, a very clear trend emerged showing that the more recent the study, the fewer words its participants spoke.
For each year that passed, the model estimated about 338 fewer words per day. This seems like a small amount, but it equates to more than 120,000 fewer words over the course of a year. When we look at this in the context of the entire period analyzed, the difference is enormous, as the model estimated that in 2019 each person spoke approximately 28% fewer words per day than in 2005.
Young people are quieter… but they are not the only ones.
Among those under 25, the model estimated a decrease of 451 words per day for each year that passed, compared to 314 among those over 25. Although this could indicate that mobile phone and app use contributes to the change, it does not appear that technology is the only cause.
Nor does age even begin to explain the entire decline. We are facing structural changes in how we meet and communicate today that affect everyone. Although much scientific work remains to be done, we have some usual suspects, such as remote work, online shopping, solitary leisure activities linked to a screen, and the rise of cities where people no longer know their neighbors. It seems that talking has become less necessary.
Lost words?
And here lies the great unanswered question. We don’t know if digital conversations are contributing to the loss or, in some way, compensating for it through other means. Perhaps in 2026 we won’t be communicating less, but rather in a different way.
In Spain, for example, it’s estimated that we send or receive an average of more than 5 voice messages a day , with Generation Z leading the way at more than 7 voice notes daily. These are spoken words, yes, but they’re not a conversation. A voice note is a delayed monologue, without turns, without interruptions, without adjusting what we say based on how our listener reacts in real time. It’s talking without conversing.
Anxiety about live conversation
Written messages are not a natural substitute for conversation either. In another study , participants were asked to reconnect with someone with whom they had been close years earlier. Two out of three people preferred to send an email rather than call, because they thought hearing the other person’s voice would be much more awkward.
But when they finally spoke, they found that the dreaded awkwardness they had anticipated didn’t materialize. The phone call fostered a stronger connection than the email without being any more embarrassing. It didn’t even take up more time. We shy away from voice communication out of a fear that the evidence doesn’t support.
What’s at stake is vocabulary
There is one dimension that particularly concerns those of us who study language. Thanks to the massive collaborative studies in which Nebrija University has participated, involving nearly 170,000 native speakers from 19 countries, we know that an adult Spanish speaker recognizes an average of 30,000 words . But the most revealing piece of data is how that number changes with age.
Contrary to what many believe, vocabulary doesn’t wither with age. Rather, it grows throughout life. Our elders are society’s great lexical repository.
Vocabulary expands by listening to and using words in varied contexts, with different people, and about different topics. Every conversation with a plumber, a pharmacist, or the neighbor next door exposes us to a lexicon that may differ from that of our usual chats, written in haste, with emoticons and abbreviations. Spoken conversation is the conveyor belt on which vocabulary travels from one generation to the next.
And this is where the two main studies converge in a disturbing way. The group in which the decline is most pronounced, those under 25, is precisely the one whose vocabulary still has plenty of room to grow.
If we speak 28% less, and what we do say is concentrated in audio messages or texts sent to the same old contacts, the question isn’t just how many words we use, but how many different words we use and with whom. If that conveyor belt runs less and always connects the same people, the opportunities for new words to spread from one speaker to another also decrease.
What 300 words can do
The most disturbing finding of the study isn’t the figure itself, but the context. We are experiencing an epidemic of loneliness, and there are clear links between loneliness and declining health , between the amount of daily conversation and well-being. Talking to other people is related to feeling more connected, and in turn, social connection is closely linked to how good we feel.
The good news is that the recipe is ridiculously cheap. Three hundred words a day is a brief chat in the hallway with a neighbor or colleague, a joke we tell at home, or a slightly longer answer to the well-worn question, “How are you?” Or, while we’re at it, a two-minute phone call instead of a two-minute audio message. The same amount of time, maybe even the same words, but with someone on the other end.
Author Bio: Jon Andoni Duñabeitia is the Director of the Nebrija Research Center in Cognition (CINC) and Director of the International Chair in Cognitive Health (ICCH) at Nebrija University
