In the News
People Are Speaking 28% Fewer Words Than in 2005. That’s a Leadership Problem Now.
A new study out of the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Arizona, published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, found that the average person spoke about 338 fewer words out loud every year between 2005 and 2019. Add it up and daily spoken word count fell from roughly 16,000 words a day to about 12,000, a 28 percent drop. Among people under 25, the decline is steeper still: 44 percent fewer spoken words than their counterparts twenty years ago.
This isn’t really a story about phones, even though phones are part of it. It’s a story about a workforce that’s increasingly out of practice with the specific skill extended, spoken conversation actually requires: catching nuance, reading tone, and building a shared understanding in real time rather than in a string of asynchronous messages.
Why This Lands on Leaders’ Desks
Spoken language carries precision a memo can’t. Tone, pacing, and the back-and-forth of a real conversation catch misunderstandings before they calcify into decisions. As one senior partner at Korn Ferry put it plainly in response to the study: the concern isn’t abstract, it’s about whether a message actually lands the way it was intended.
The practical risk for organizations is straightforward. A workforce less practiced in extended verbal exchange is a workforce more likely to misread a difficult conversation, more likely to let a written message stand in for a discussion that actually needed nuance, and more likely to default to text and email even when the stakes call for something better. That’s not a minor communication-skills gap. It compounds into misalignment, slower decisions, and the kind of quiet friction that shows up later as turnover or missed execution.
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