We all speak Crimean

KEN COCKBURN traces the one original language – that of the Yamnaya pastoral nomads – from which all European and Indian languages derive

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AS a student back in the late 1970s, I remember hearing about proto-Indo-European, the language from which most current European and Indian langauges are derived. It was then, and remains, a theoretical construct, as it left no direct traces.

Back then, linguists had worked back through extant layers of its many descendants to posit their common ancestor, helped by archaeological evidence. 

In the half-century since, both linguists and archaeologists have made new discoveries, and they have been greatly assisted by the findings of a new field: genetics, which allows migrations to be tracked more accurately, as well as providing information about diet and thus their culture.

Laura Spinney’s Proto outlines current understanding based on triangulating the three disciplines’ findings, as well as contributions made by mythographers, ethnographers and biologists.

She describes how hunter-gatherers became farmers and herders, developing agriculture and metalworking, before a group now known as the Yamnaya left the currently contested lands of eastern Ukraine for the steppe, the vast grasslands extending west and east. 

There they took up “nomadic pastoralism… as economies go, theirs was revolutionary, because it allowed them to unlock the vast energy reserves of the Eurasian steppe.” As their numbers increased, so did their range. Again, there is no direct evidence linking proto-Indo-European to the Yamnaya, but all the available evidence points to that being their language.

Today, its surviving descendants (how many haven’t survived is anyone’s guess) number about 400: “Many of the languages of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran; the Slavic and Baltic tongues; Welsh, Irish and the other Celtic languages; English and her Germanic sisters; Greek, Armenian and Albanian; and the myriad offspring of Latin.”

The only complete outlier in Europe is Basque, which untypically survived the incursions, peaceful and violent, of waves of Indo-European speakers.)

It was Dante Aligheri (the poet who wrote The Divine Comedy) who, in the early 1300s, first posited that contemporary languages had evolved from older tongues, by identifying words in Italian, Spanish, French and Occitan which are similar to words with the same meaning in Latin. Accepted wisdom at the time came from the Book of Genesis, where God, annoyed by the presumption of the builders of the Tower of Babel, says: “Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand each other’s speech.”

It was some centuries before the evolutionary path became more widely accepted. Such acceptance came in part by way of British colonial expansion in India, as classically educated officials encountered Sanskrit, and noticed its similarities with Latin and Greek.

Spinney outlines the evidence for where and by whom proto-Indo-European was spoken, before dedicating chapters to its main descendants, both dead (Anatolian and Tocharian) and living (Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Indo-Iranian, Baltic, Slavic and Greek).

Spinney is not herself a linguist (or an archaeologist or geneticist); her previous book, The Pale Rider, was about the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. The book is written unfussily, without academic jargon, but it’s well footnoted, contains useful maps and has a 21-page bibliography for those wanting to delve further into the subject.

The book looks at the history of language, but its findings and conclusions have contemporary resonance at a time of resurgent nationalism which values and promotes the unity of language, culture and ethnicity, and which views migration as disruptive and detrimental. 

As Spinney writes in her conclusion: “Language is becoming a battleground in the identity wars, and preserving our linguistic ‘purity’ a justification used by those who want to raise walls. Unfortunately for them, the most successful language the world ever knew was a hybrid trafficked by migrants. It changed as it went, and when it stopped changing, it died.”

Languages, like populations, grow, adapt and evolve over time, but what this book shows is how apparently diverse societies across the globe are — linguistically, culturally and genetically — more connected than separate.

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