But a new study, conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen in the Netherlands, has found that it is not entirely foreigners and their sloppy ways that are to blame for languages becoming simpler.
It is hard to work out where culture has affected language, where language affects culture and cognition (a hot topic of psycholinguistic research), and where the differences are unrelated.
The biggest practical issues concern health, says A.K. Rahim, a linguistics researcher working with Translators Without Borders (TWB), a group that helps humanitarian agencies.
Julia Sallabank, a linguist at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, has described how experts have historically approached languages in danger of extinction.
In addition to these historical breakthroughs, linguistic researchers recently proposed the provisional identification of a few of the manuscript's words.