One of my favorite subjects is the migration of homo sapiens from their ancestral home to the rest of the world. It is a remarkable story, and as I understand it, the number that left Africa some 60,000 years ago was small, and yet almost everyone on earth can claim lineage to that group.
Equally fascinating is the story of languages spoken by human beings. A recent book I finished reading, Proto: How one ancient language went global, by Laura Spinney, satisfied my curiosity about many aspects of what most of us speak. This is a summary of that fascinating book.
The speakers of Proto-Indo-European, the mother (or is it father) of almost all the languages spoken by half of humanity, were only a few dozen to begin with. They lived between Europe and Asia in the region of the Black Sea. However, their language exploded out of Black Sea cradle, spreading east and west, fragmenting as it went. Within a thousand years, its offspring could be heard from Ireland to India. It is easily the most important event of the last five thousand years.
It took another three and half thousand years and the invention of ocean-going ship, but after 1492, some of these languages implanted themselves in the new world and expanded again.
Plenty of Indo-European languages have lived and died, but over 400 are still spoken today.
Eight billion humans speak around seven thousand languages that fall into one hundred and forty families. Most of us, however, speak languages that belong to just five of them: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, and Austronesian. Of these, the two behemoths are the first two. Every second person on earth speaks the languages in the first family, and Mandarin (which has more native speakers than English) being the major Sino-Tibetan language.
1n 1786, a British judge, Sir William Jones, asserted that Sanskrit, Latin and Greek had sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists. He added that Germanic, Celtic, and Iranian might have sprung from the same source. Since my mother tongue, Gujarati, is an offspring of Sanskrit, this is of a great deal of importance to me.
There are twelve main branches of the Indo-European Language: Anatolian, Tocharian, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Indic, and Iranic. Anatolian, a dead language, was spoken on the Turkish peninsula, and Tocharian, another dead language, was spoken in the Silk Road in North-west China. The Dravidian languages of South India, as well as Uralic languages (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian), and Basque, do not belong to the Indo-European family.
The Indo-European Languages (source: Proto, by Laura Spinney)
Genetics has determined the scale and in some case speed of migrations that archeologists had only observed in freeze frames. They have confirmed beyond reasonable doubt the huge role that migration has played in the story of humanity and its languages.
As we speak, we have multiple ways in which we can peer back at how human beings spread. Three most important ones are: Genetics, archeology, and linguists. However, according to Laura, they don’t speak the same language (no pun intended). Archeologists think in terms of cultures, recurring patterns of objects that define group’s identity in some way. Cultures rise and fall, albeit with dilutions and concentrations, so geneticists have a different concept of identity. Languages change through both descent and contact, but they are less intimately tied up with who we are.
Fewer than hundred people may have spoken the dialect that gave rise to all extant Indo-European languages. They are called Yamnaya. Scientists even claim that the oldest sites, from where the oldest Yamnaya genomes have come from, are located between the lower reaches of the river Dnieper and Don, in the east of Ukraine. Yamnaya were typically brown haired and brown eyed, with a complexion between fair and dark. They were very tall, some six feet in case of men.
Archeologists are fairly certain that the Yamnaya hunted horses but are divided over whether they rode them---and whether this is how the early Indo-European languages expanded so far, so fast.
Why do experts feel that Yamnaya spoke Proto-Indo-European? It is because the language mirror’s speaker’s world. From the broken reflection of that world that the linguists have pieced together, archeologists and geneticists can tell which prehistoric people were most likely to inhabit it.
Proto-Indo-European has been reconstructed based on a comparison of its offspring, an exercise that has revealed the Indo-European sound laws—those shifts in pronunciations that transformed the mother tongue into its daughters. No other proto language has received so much scholarly attention.
From such analysis, the scholars believe that the speakers of Proto-Indo-European knew wheeled transportation. In 3500 BCE, according to archeologists, only the steppe dwellers who herded horses, cattle and sheep lived to the west of the Urals. Most European men alive today, and millions of their counterparts in Central and South Asia, carry Y chromosomes that came from the steppe. Recent DNA analysis shows that a group of Yamnaya had travelled the length of the Eurasian steppes in a few decades, perhaps less.
When Yamnaya arrived in Hungary, the population of Europe was estimated to be seven million. The migrants might have numbered in the tens of thousands, yet within a thousand years, languages descended from theirs were spoken across the continent. The Indo-Europeans may simply have been good at having children and keeping them alive. If they kept it up over generations, steppe ancestry would have spread through the population, and Indo-European languages with it.
The people in the region first became bilingual. Then they stopped speaking the old language to their children. The parents calculated that it would be better if the next generation was fluent in the language of power and wealth, or teenagers appraising the world decided this for themselves.
There is another interesting fact described in the book, particularly for those born in northern India where Sanskrit (the mother of almost all north Indian languages) was spoken at one time.
In the middle of the Russian steppe, at a settlement called Sintashta, the archeologists wondered if they were looking at the origin of Ashvamedha, a ritual described in the ancient Indian texts. If so, there could be links with the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. This branch is the largest in terms of both the number of speakers and the geographical range. If people of Sintashta performed rituals that their descendants carried to India and Iran then the Aryans (the name by which ancient Indians and Iranians identified themselves) must have crosse the steppe. Thirty years on, the linguists and geneticists have added their contribution to those of the archeologists, but the Aryan chapter of the Indo-European story remains the most politicized and contentious, as mentioned before.
The Rig Veda, the oldest Indic text, was written in the foothills of the Hindu Kush in Punjab region that straddles between India and Pakistan. Most likely it was written between 1500 and 1200 BCE. By 1600 BCE, steppe ancestry was in Pakistan’s Swat valley and from there it diffused through the entire subcontinent. This assertion remains contentious as mentioned above. Some people in India assert that the idea of Sanskrit coming from outside of India is not correct.
So, there are two possibilities, either Sanskrit came to India from outside or India is the homeland of the entire family. Proponents of this latter theory have made very little effort to explain how the other Indo-European languages ended up where they did.
The Indo-European speaking Aryans were not the first people to arrive in India. The archeologists have long discovered the Indus Valley Civilization, populated by the Harrapans. They, however, had no genetic connection to the steppe; for eons they had been indigenous to the subcontinent.
Also, the Harrapans most likely invented agriculture independently of the development in the Near East. So, farmers and farming did not come with the speakers of the Indo-European language. Some of the mysteries can be solved if someone is able to decipher the Harrapan script. That has not been the case. It is believed that the Harrapan civilization died slowly as the monsoon failed and not due to any invasion from the Aryans.
Many of the offspring of the first Indo-European language died. The ones that survived proved adaptable in their turn. They did not stay the same, nor did their languages. That was the secret of their success.
The human compulsion to communication is overwhelming. It was there even before sapiens. Some argue that without language there will be no reasoning, others that there is no consciousness. People change language just by using them. Accumulation of conscious and unconscious changes causes language to split.
Languages do erode. Of the roughly seven thousand languages that are spoken in the world today, nearly half are considered endangered. Keeping endangered languages alive seems to be a good thing. However, the solution isn’t simply to put ever more resources into teaching. First, they have to work out why people are abandoning the languages, then they have to address the inequalities that are causing them to do so. Language is a tool, and it lives as long as it is useful in opening doors for its speakers and improving their lives.
People are moving around the Black Sea today for the same reasons they did six thousand years ago: trade, war, and climate change. The climate crisis is real and its effects are already being felt. Whatever way the crisis unfolds, the world is unlikely to stay the same, linguistically speaking. The Indo-European languages came to dominate mainly as a result of the small, temporary movement of people over time---the kind of displacements that would happen as the climate change intensifies.
The new tools of archeology and genetics have opened our eyes to our past. Migration has been constant, ‘indigenous’ is relative. Ten thousand years of human displacement have shrunk the genetic distance between populations to the point where ethnic divisions are losing meaning. The desire to belong is as strong as ever, and it is harder to see the differences between ‘them and ‘us. Linguistic and cultural boundaries are being guarded more jealously. Language is becoming a battleground in the identity wars, and preserving our linguistic ‘purity’ is used as justification 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.
