Decline of word use

BBC - Two academics — Matthias Mehl and Valeria Pfeifer [found] there was a theory that women, on average, spoke more than men. So Matthias and his colleagues strapped listening devices to hundreds of people and found the theory was wrong: men and women both spoke about 16,000 words a day.

But recently, they went back and looked at a bigger pool of recordings over a longer timeframe and found something else: everyone is now speaking less. Between 2005 and 2019, the average person experienced a 28% drop in how many words they spoke in an average day.