How Migration and Soft Power Made Indo-European Languages Dominant

History shows that linguistics evolve in unpredictable ways.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
How soft power propelled the rise of Indo European languages
by Laura Spinney. Laura Spinney is a science journalist and
the author of Proto How One ancient Language Went Global
Read by Mara Finnerty. About five thousand years ago, a
group of herders living in the grasslands north of the

(00:21):
Black Sea headed west, taking their animals with them. They
got as far as the Carpathian Basin, the western extremity
of the vast Eurasian steppe centered on modern Hungry, but
their descendants pushed farther, and within one thousand years languages
related to those of the original migrants were spoken as

(00:42):
far west as Ireland's Atlantic coast. That is the leading
explanation to day for how the majority of Europeans came
to speak the languages they do, and not just Europeans.
At the same time that those intrepid step dwellers set
off west, others speaking related dialects headed east, planting their

(01:03):
way of speaking in Asia. Both Eastern and Western dialect
clusters share the label Indo European because by the time
linguists noticed the family resemblance in the eighteenth century, they
were spoken from Europe to the Indian subcontinent. Millennia of
human sagas helped drive those early Indo European dialects into

(01:25):
the branches we recognize as Romance, Celtic and Germanic, not
to mention Baltic, Slavic, Albanian, Greek, Armenian, Indic, and Ironic,
those sagas which I recount in my book Proto How
One Ancient Language Went Global. William Collins April twenty twenty
five established the contours of Eurasia's linguistic landscape that broadly

(01:50):
persist to this day. Indo European is now the world's
largest language family, spanning English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, and hundreds
of others. It is spoken by nearly half of humanity.
But if today we take the languages we speak for granted,
the lesson from history is that a linguistic landscape is

(02:12):
always in flux, and unpredictable events can reconfigure it quite dramatically.
Languages like Empires can fall as well as arise. The
so called step hypothesis for the spread of Indo European
only pulled ahead of the field about a decade ago.
Until then, a rival theory held that Indo European languages

(02:34):
arrived nine thousand years ago, brought by farmers from the
Near East, But in twenty fifteen, having analyzed DNA from
ancient human bones, geneticists revealed a marked shift in the
European gene pool five thousand years ago. It was the
corroboration that many linguists have been looking for that the
languages had also arrived at that time, brought by immigrants

(02:58):
who added their DNA to that of the previous inhabitants,
in some places, nearly replacing it. Linguists were less clear
on how the shift had come about, and some experts
suggested it could only have happened through violent conquest, but
archaeologists objected to this scenario, noting that the step migrants
went no further than what is now hungry were the

(03:21):
material culture that defined them, their tools, bodily adornments, and
remains of their burial rights ran out. Nor were those
migrants particularly violent, judging by the lack of evidence of
traumatic injury on their skeletons and the scarcity of weapons
in their graves. There was another puzzle too. The archaeologists estimated,

(03:43):
based on their count of the burial mounds that the
immigrants left behind, that there might have been forty thousand
of them camped out in the Pushta or Hungarian Step.
At the height of the migration. The population of Europe
at that time was about seven million, seven million in people,
that is speaking entirely unrelated languages, of which Basque is

(04:05):
considered an isolated relic, even if they were violent, How
did so few newcomers get the linguistic upper hand. Over
the past decade, a more nuanced, multifactorial explanation has emerged.
It has become clear that the genetic turnover took longer
than researchers had initially suspected, more than a dozen generations

(04:28):
in places. In that time, epidemics probably ravaged the continent,
wiping out whole communities of indigenous farmers. The immigrants, less
sedentary and perhaps with heartier immune systems due to living
in close proximity with their herds, might have been partially
protected from those diseases. There is also evidence that those

(04:49):
immigrants were good at building in cementing alliances, perhaps of necessity,
since back in the Step they were always on the
move in search of new pastures and separated from related
clans and groups for long periods of time. This evidence
is part linguistic. Knowing that consistent sound changes separate the

(05:09):
various branches of the Indo European family tree, historical linguists
are able to compare related words across those branches and
reconstruct the common ancestor the word in the parent or
proto language Proto Indo European that the daughter language is inherited.
This exercise reveals that the speakers of Proto Indo European,

(05:32):
presumed to be those step herders, had a term for hospitality,
and this concept really mattered to them since it was
reliably handed down to the inheritors of their language. That
term was ghostess. The word is hypothetical. It has never
been documented, which is not surprising given that the language
it belonged to pre dated writing. This word became geist

(05:55):
in Old English, meaning stranger or guest, and hospice in
Latin host or guest. The fact that these words combined
concepts that have been separated in modern English guest and
host indicates that there was an expectation of reciprocity among
the speakers of the parent language. I will treat you

(06:16):
well as a stranger in my land and I expect
you to do the same when I come to yours.
From quite early in the Indo European story, hospitality may
have involved alcohol, notably need, for which a proto word
med who, which is another hypothetical word has been reconstructed,
and bards who told stories that glorified the generous host

(06:39):
Ghostypodus literally the lord of guests, and the probable root
of the word hospitality. Alcohol was consumed in Europe before
the arrival of the step nomads, but clues both linguistic
and archaeological finds of double handed drinking cups bearing traces
of honey, grape, or grain, for example, suggests that the

(06:59):
nomads or their descendants were the first to make it
a social obligation to the resident farmers. Ravaged by disease, and,
as the archaeological record attests, probably also by famine and
internescent strife. These high living newcomers might have represented the
possibility of a better life. Those who made alliances with

(07:19):
them were wined, dined, and bewitched with tales, in other words,
seduced by soft power. Alcohol may have aided the spread
of the languages in another way, too, since we know
that in small doses it loosens in abitions, making new
languages easier to learn, the land's original inhabitants would likely

(07:40):
have become bilingual and in time simply stop speaking the
old languages to their children. In linguistic terms, we are
now living through an exceptional era. Nations, national languages and
widespread literacy are only a few centuries old. Linguist Kofeiyakpo
at the University of Hong Kong says that by imposing

(08:03):
standards for how we speak and spell, these institutions, along
with new technologies such as the Internet, slow linguistic evolution
relative to a time when languages were only or mainly spoken.
But even in the English speaking world, with its clear
written standards, there is evidence that populations are becoming more

(08:24):
multi lingual. Levels of international migration are holding steady, although
the direction of travel has shifted. For the four hundred years.
Prior to World War II, for example, the net flow
of migrants was away from Europe, now it is toward Europe.
Those immigrants bring a kaleidoscope of different languages with them,

(08:45):
and while pressure to assimilate is strong, there is evidence
that they and their offspring are holding on to their
mother tongues for longer over generations, those languages must influence
the local ones with which they coh abbot. It's one
thing to talk about how global migration patterns affect the
internal makeup of languages, quite another to talk about how

(09:08):
future events might affect the parts of the world where
those languages are spoken. Even if individual languages are changing
more slowly than in the past, the balance of power
between them has the potential to shift quickly within a
few generations, as it did in prehistory. If China were
to replace the US as the dominant global superpower, Mandarin

(09:32):
would likely move up the hierarchy of prestige and English down.
If India were to drop English as an official language
in favor of Hindi, that would be another blow to
the hegemity of the world's first and for now only,
global language. Neither event is beyond the realm of possibility,
and it wouldn't be too much of a stretch for

(09:54):
South Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asian countries to start favoring
Mandarin O English as a lingua franca. Could the outcome
be that English one day meets its match, perhaps in
a non Indo European language. That also attains the status
of global lingua franca. Could English itself one day become endangered.

(10:18):
History tells us that no language is immutable or immortal.
Basque is all that remains of the languages spoken across
Europe before the arrival of those nomads from the East.
Latin is dead, and Arabic knocked two major languages, Egyptian
and Aramaic, off their imperial perches. It may be hard

(10:39):
to predict what our great great grandchildren will speak, but
it is dangerous to assume that they and we would
be able to hold a conversation.