Americans are saying 28% fewer words to each other and 75% of the young don’t talk to their neighbors — blame Silicon Valley

In his 1919 poem “The Unknown Friends,” American poet Edgar Guest wrote that “each one of us has friends that he / Has yet to meet and really know.” But what happens when Americans no longer want to meet and really know each other? And when tech keeps them from doing so? The data tell us that Americans are quite literally speaking to each other less. A March 2026 study demonstrated that the number of words the average person uttered fell by 28% between 2005 and 2019. That’s a drop of about 330 spoken words a day, or 120,000 over the course of a year. Silicon Valley is unworried. If anything, they’d like to see those numbers come down even more. In July, tech startup Friend launched a new iteration of its controversial AI necklace, designed to talk back to lonely users. Americans will be ta