Proto
How One Ancient Language Went Global
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
*A GUARDIAN, NEW STATESMAN, PROSPECT AND WATERSTONES BEST BOOK OF 2025*
'The fascinating story of ancient words … new revelations await' The Guardian
'A magisterial feat' New Scientist
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One ancient language transformed our world. This is its story.
Star. Stjarna. Stare. Thousands of miles apart, people look up at the night sky and use the same word to describe what they see.
Listen to these English, Icelandic and Iranic words and you can hear echoes of one of the most extraordinary journeys in humanity’s past. All three of these languages – and hundreds more – share a single ancient ancestor.
Five millennia ago, in a mysterious Big Bang of its own, this proto tongue exploded, forming new worlds as it spread east and west. Today, nearly half of humanity speaks an Indo-European language. How did this happen?
In Proto, acclaimed journalist Laura Spinney sets off to find out. With her we travel the length of the steppe, navigating the Caucasus, the Silk Roads and the Hindu Kush. We follow in the footsteps of nomads and monks, Amazon warriors and lion kings – the ancient peoples who spread these tongues far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the linguists, archaeologists and geneticists racing to recover this lost world. What they have discovered has vital lessons for our modern age, as people and their languages are on the move again.
Proto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words.
About the author
Laura Spinney is a science journalist and writer. She is the author of the celebrated Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World. Her writing on science has appeared in National Geographic, Nature, The Guardian and The Atlantic, among others. Born in the UK, she lives in Paris.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist and novelist Spinney (Pale Rider) explains how a single language family spread across the world in this astute account. Combining the discoveries of linguists, archaeologists, and geneticists—"barbarians to each other" in their mutual unintelligibility—Spinney aims to take the most holistic approach yet to the topic. The Proto-Indo-European language emerged 6,000 years ago around the Black Sea when the Yamnaya, a group of nomadic herders, shifted into mining and farming—and interacted with others who pioneered those arts—before migrating outward. Spinney traces these early years before considering each major branch, including the extinct Tocharian line (which penetrated into China); the Western European mix of Latin, Celtic, and Germanic; and the Indo-Iranian offshoot (seeded by a return migration eastward during a climate crisis). Each academic specialty provides fascinating insights, among them a stunning genetic discovery from 2020 revealing remains of cousins buried 2,000 miles apart 5,000 years ago, proving migration could have been very rapid; deconstructions of vocabularies that reveal migratory patterns (for instance, since the first Proto-Indo-European speakers were herders, later coastal dwelling speakers had to borrow seafaring terms from other languages); and new interpretations of myths that question whether violent conquest was behind the spread as opposed to marrying outward or mass migration. Impressively weaving raw data and disparate academic conjectures into a sweeping saga, this rivets.
