A new study by researchers at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Arizona has found that the average number of words Americans speak aloud to other people fell by nearly 28 percent between 2005 and 2019 — a trend researchers warn has likely accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Americans are talking less than at any point in recorded history, according to new research that tracked spoken word counts across more than two decades of social change.
The study, published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, found that in 2005 the average person spoke approximately 16,632 words per day to other human beings. By 2019, that number had dropped dramatically — a decline of nearly 28 percent. Researchers attribute the shift to the growing normalcy of text-based communication, app-based ordering, and the broader migration of social life onto digital platforms.
The findings are drawn from an analysis of 22 studies in which more than 2,000 participants recorded audio of their daily lives. This naturalistic recording method, rather than self-reporting, gave researchers an unusually direct window into actual conversational behaviour rather than how people perceive or remember their interactions.
"Between 2005 and 2019, the number of words we speak out loud to another human being fell by nearly 28 percent," the researchers noted, adding that the pandemic years — marked by lockdowns, remote work, and the further collapse of incidental social contact — almost certainly pushed that figure lower still.
The period in question coincides with the mass adoption of smartphones, the explosion of social media platforms, and the normalisation of conducting everyday transactions — from ordering food to arranging transport — entirely through apps, often without speaking a single word.
While the study does not establish a direct causal link between any single technology and reduced speech, the timeline aligns closely with the rise of messaging apps and the gradual replacement of phone calls with text-based alternatives. In 2005, texting was still emerging as a mainstream habit; by 2019, it had become the dominant mode of casual communication for many demographics.
The implications of the shift remain an open question among social scientists. Spoken conversation has long been understood as central to relationship formation, emotional regulation, and cognitive development. Some researchers have raised concerns that declining verbal interaction — particularly among younger generations — could have downstream effects on mental health, language acquisition, and community cohesion.
Others caution against over-interpreting the data. Written communication, they argue, has expanded enormously in the same period, and it is not yet clear whether reduced spoken word counts translate into reduced meaningful social connection, or simply a shift in the medium through which people connect.
The researchers' data cuts off in 2019, meaning the full impact of the pandemic — during which in-person interaction collapsed globally — is not yet captured in the study. Follow-up research tracking word counts through 2020 and beyond is expected to provide a clearer picture of how much further the decline has extended.
Analysis
Why This Matters
- A sustained, measurable decline in spoken communication could have significant implications for mental health, social cohesion, and language development — particularly for children growing up in an increasingly text-first world.
- The study provides rare empirical grounding for a widely felt cultural intuition: that people are becoming more isolated and less verbally engaged, even in public spaces.
- With the data ending in 2019, the full scale of the pandemic's impact on human conversation remains unmeasured, making follow-up research an urgent priority.
Background
The study of spoken language in naturalistic settings has a relatively short history, constrained by the practical and ethical difficulties of recording people in daily life. The advent of small, wearable audio recorders in the early 2000s opened new possibilities for researchers, enabling the kind of large-scale, ecologically valid data collection that underpins this study.
The period from 2005 to 2019 was one of the most transformative in the history of human communication. The launch of the first iPhone in 2007, the rise of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage, and the explosion of app-based services all reshaped when, how, and whether people chose to speak to one another. Phone calls gave way to texts; face-to-face transactions gave way to digital interfaces.
Previous research has documented rising rates of loneliness and social isolation over a similar timeframe, particularly in the United States and United Kingdom. While causality is difficult to establish, the convergence of declining verbal interaction with rising loneliness metrics has prompted growing interest from psychologists, public health researchers, and policymakers.
Key Perspectives
Public health researchers: View declining spoken interaction as a potential contributor to the loneliness epidemic, arguing that voice and face-to-face contact carry emotional and neurological benefits that text-based communication may not fully replicate.
Technology optimists: Contend that digital communication has expanded the total volume and reach of human connection, allowing people to maintain relationships across distances and form communities that would have been impossible in purely physical social environments.
Critics/Skeptics: Question whether word count is a meaningful proxy for conversational quality or social wellbeing, noting that a shorter but more emotionally meaningful conversation may be more valuable than hours of idle small talk.
What to Watch
- Publication of follow-up studies extending the dataset through the pandemic years (2020–2023), which are expected to reveal whether the decline steepened further.
- Research examining whether the trend differs significantly by age group — particularly whether younger generations show sharper declines than older cohorts.
- Policy or public health responses, especially in countries already treating loneliness as a formal health concern, such as the United Kingdom, which appointed a Minister for Loneliness in 2018.