People are talking less every year, but no one’s quite sure why

20 years ago, there was a theory that women spoke more than men. So the researcher Matthias Mehl and his colleagues strapped listening devices to hundreds of people to test it. They found out the theory was wrong: men and women both spoke about 16,000 words a day. But recently, Dr. Mehl and his colleagues went back and looked at a bigger pool of recordings over a longer timeframe and found that while men and women still speak as much as each other, the overall number of words people speak in a given day has plummeted. In this episode, Katty Kay speaks with Matthias Mehl — a researcher and professor at the University of Arizona — about why he thinks people are speaking less than they used to, and what it means for society if people are starting to slide into silence.  00:00 Dropping Word Counts  00:44 What Experts Found  01:50 Running The Experiment 02:41 Is Texting Replacing Talking? 04:30 What Conversations Are We Losing?  05:39 Casual Interactions  08:37 Post-Pandemic Impact  09:45 Reversing The Trend You’re watching New Normal with Katty Kay — each week we bring you conversations with expert guests about how our world is changing and what that means for our lives.  Explore past episodes and get early access to new ones on BBC.com.  #BBC #speech #psychology