What prompted you to write a book on the origins of the Proto-Indo-European language?
In summer 2022, a linguist mentioned the origin story of the Indo-European languages and how research in the field was racing ahead. I was intrigued because, in the last 10 years, we’ve been able to extract and read DNA from ancient and modern human remains. I realised that the story of the Indo-European languages —their origins and spread — needed to be retold for the new
What prompted you to write a book on the origins of the Proto-Indo-European language?
In summer 2022, a linguist mentioned the origin story of the Indo-European languages and how research in the field was racing ahead. I was intrigued because, in the last 10 years, we’ve been able to extract and read DNA from ancient and modern human remains. I realised that the story of the Indo-European languages —their origins and spread — needed to be retold for the new age.
As I started talking to linguists, archaeologists and geneticists, I realised they were all providing different pieces of the same puzzle. Most people agree that these languages trace back to a single common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European. But because it predated writing, people naturally asked: Who spoke this first language? Where did they live? How did they live?
Until 10 or 20 years ago, archaeology was our primary source of evidence. Then the ancient DNA technology came along. What that provided was tracing prehistoric populations through their migrations across space and time. Migration is one of the main motors of language change. While it’s not always kept to, but as a rule of thumb the branching of language families can be mapped quite convincingly onto these migration paths.
What does its story reveal about the connections between East and West?
At a session on The Odyssey at the Jaipur Literature Festival, Stephen Fry and other speakers were discussing similarities between Greek epics and oral storytelling traditions found in Indian villages. It’s not a coincidence. Their languages are related, and along with those languages travelled stories, myths, poetic traditions and cultural practices. Bardic traditions are by no means unique to the Indo-European family, but there are recurring themes and motifs that appear across these mythologies and literary traditions.
The evidence points to very deep connections between East and West that go back much further than we usually imagine. Western histories often begin with the Greeks and Romans; Eastern histories with the earliest Indic, Hindu or Persian writings. But beneath those familiar histories lie much deeper layers of shared ancestry; about as far back as our current tools allow us to see.
What does the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language tell us about the people who spoke it?
This is a language that has been dead for around 4,000 years. Since it was never written down, linguists reconstructed it by comparing related words and expressions preserved in languages such as Sanskrit and Greek.
That reconstructed lexicon offers an understanding of the society that spoke it. For example, there are many words for a woman’s in-laws, but very few for a man’s. Linguists deduce that women generally moved into the man’s household after forming a family. I hesitate to call it marriage because that may not have been an institution they recognised.
Conservatively, linguists think that these people were nomadic herders rather than settled farmers. They also knew the wagon, meaning they must have lived after its invention around 3500 BC and so were also among the earliest practitioners of dairying.
In response to patriarchy going as far back as that, what I find reassuring is that the evidence suggests humans have always been capable of both violence and cooperation. There are historians, such as Peter Turchin, who argue that societies move through cycles of integration and disintegration, but that, over the long run, humanity learns.
We were talking in France, where I live, and he said, I think we will have a crisis. But will it be as bad as the French Revolution? I don’t think so, because we’ve learned how to sort of stop killing each other when we have a crisis. It’s all a certain amount of speculation in that one would hope it was true.
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How reliable are these kinds of reconstructions?
The reconstructed lexicon provides clues, which you take with a pinch of salt, about how these people lived and thought. Archaeologists then ask if we’re talking forward of 3500 BC, who was living in this part of the world and how? Could they be a match for people who spoke and thought a certain way?
Genetics comes in because it tells us how those people moved. We assume people carried their language with them. Then, we observe them spread towards all the places where the Indo-European languages would eventually be spoken, even in the ancient world. Now they’re on every continent, but even in the ancient world, they were spoken throughout Eurasia.
When did scholars first realise that European and Indian languages were related?
It happened thousands of years after the original migrations. The recognition of these relationships was a slow process that unfolded over a couple of hundred years.
First, scholars had to realise that the Romance languages were related. Then they recognised the Germanic family, and gradually worked backwards, expanding the boundaries of the linguistic family until they understood that all these languages shared a deeper common ancestor.
This also had to do with the expanding empires. Increased travel also exposed scholars to unfamiliar languages. People travelling through the empire, for whatever reason, brought them into contact with new languages and those who bothered to learn the languages in both directions, started noticing these resemblances.
Inferring from how long gone languages have been reconstructed, can we also predict how languages will evolve in the future?
I pestered many linguists to get them to predict but no sensible linguist would do it. Language change, for the moment, is very hard to predict. AI may eventually help because it is good at detecting patterns in enormous data sets. If we properly harness its potential in this domain, we could start to tease out a shape that language evolution may take. But we can’t for the moment.
English is unlikely to splinter into daughter languages the same way that Latin or Sanskrit once did. One important reason is literacy. In the Roman Empire or ancient India, most dialects naturally drifted apart because there was no written version of the language knitting together its speakers.
Today, widespread literacy has slowed down language evolution. One linguist who I quote in the last chapter of my book, suggests at least the spoken form of English may splinter, though the written form, which we all share in order to be able to understand each other, keeps it still knit together.
Technology, and especially AI, is said to be homogenising language.
If technology can instantly translate what someone is saying, people may feel less motivated to learn another language. At the same time, say, a small or even marginalised variant of a language becomes associated with some cultural phenomenon, like some type of cool new music, it might spread very quickly. So, there are different effects going on here.
Technologies are also helping us preserve endangered languages by recording and documenting them. I write about the drive to save endangered languages, and it’s simply not good enough to just plough money or resources into teaching the languages at school. You have to understand why those languages are dying.
When it comes to Proto-Indo European, it proliferated and diversified because of trade, at the end of the day. There’s no such thing as a successful language in itself. All languages basically do the same job for us, but there are successful speakers. And if the speakers are successful in the sense that they’re well adapted to their environment, their numbers expand. In one way, you can think of Indo European as the most successful language family the world ever knew, because we are more populous than we ever have been, and it’s spoken by nearly half of humanity.
Is that also why the Indo-European languages spread so widely?
Trade and mobility were certainly important engines. If a population is well adapted to its environment, it grows, expands and migrates. Its language travels with it and then gradually diversifies into new forms.
In one sense, Indo-European is the most successful language family. But if you look more closely, many Indo-European languages have disappeared and many others are endangered. Languages follow the fortunes of their speakers. When communities shift to other languages, their own language eventually dies.
That’s why saving a language means understanding the social and economic pressures facing its speakers. People preserve languages when they’re motivated to do so — when children continue learning them and when the language remains a living vehicle for culture.
Why were the earliest Proto-Indo-European speakers so successful?
Proto-Indo-European was spoken by the first nomadic pastoralists who had exploited the very hostile niche of the Eurasian steppe and thus, were very well adapted to their environment. Their herds converted grass into energy, into meat and milk, textiles, making their population grow. That’s what I mean by successful.
As individuals, they literally grew. They were immensely tall. Archaeology tells us, in many cases, they lived exceptionally till the age of 60, 70 and 80 as we dug graves from 5,000 years ago. But you could also argue that they were victims of their own success because they overpopulated at some point. They had to move, and claim new territories. And that involves some violence, but also demonstrates how people, ideas and languages moved together across continents over thousands of years.
Kanika Sharma is an independent journalist.
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