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"How the World's Largest Language Family Spread – and Why Others Go Extinct." Robinson, Andrew. Nature 641, no. 8061 (April 28, 2025): 31-33.

This is a review of the following three books:

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global
Laura Spinney (William Collins 2025)

The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting their Story
J. P. Mallory (Thames & Hudson 2025)

Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of HiddenLanguages
Lorna Gibb (Atlantic 2025)

Robinson begins:

A key human characteristic is our complex languages — about 7,000 of which are spoken around the world today. Understanding the origin and development of past and present languages
can help researchers to understand human evolution. 

Although today’s languages group into about 140 families, only 5 of these families are widely used: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger–Congo, Afro-Asiatic and Austronesian. Indo-European languages form the largest family, if those who speak them as a second language are included — with 12 main branches ranging historically from northwestern China to western Europe. “Almost every second person on Earth speaks Indo-European”, notes science writer Laura Spinney in Proto, one of a trio of intriguing books exploring the history of languages, common and rare. 

Both Spinney’s lively book for non-specialists, and The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered — an academic study with broad appeal by archaeologist James Mallory — focus on the origins of this vast language family. By contrast, extinct and endangered languages are the preoccupation of Rare Tongues, a quirky study by linguist Lorna Gibb, aimed at all audiences.

Not all Indo-European (IE) languages that have ever existed have survived until today.  Two that are very consequential, because they are the first two known by name to have emerged from the IE progenitor — Hittite and Tocharian — went extinct millennia ago.

Hittite was mentioned in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament, and lasted from approximately 1700 BC to 1180 BC.  They had a written language, inscribed on thousands (est. 30,000) of cuneiform tablets.  Among their texts was a horse-training manual associated with the people of the land of Mitanni that included techniques and knowledge from Old Indo-Aryan.  Whenever you see a pair of lion sculptures standing outside a bank, a government office, or other important building, bear in mind this art-architectural feature is carrying on a tradition from the Hittite capital of Hattusa.

As for Tocharian, although attested by only a small number of mostly fragmetary manuscripts, it has especially great significance for me personally, since evidence for its existence comes from archeological sites in the Tarim Basin (East Central Asia) where I worked for decades.  We have had many posts about Tocharian people, language, and culture on Language Log and articles in Sino-Platonic Papers, one of the most important ("The Problem of Tocharian Origins: An Archaeological Perspective", SPP, 259 [Nov. 2015]) being by J. P. Mallory, who also co-wrote (with VHM) another book from Thames and Hudson, The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West (2000), and in whose honor this festschrift recently appeared:  Victor H. Mair, ed., Tocharica et archaeologica (Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Series No. 69 [2024]).

Following Robinson through his entertaining, edifying survey of the trio of tomes he has chosen to review, we come upon a host of fascinating topics. Take Mallory's appendix, for instance, which lists 176 individuals who, between 1686 and 2024, each proposed homelands, for Indo-European — “as far north as the polar regions and as far south as Antarctica, from the Atlantic to the Pacific”.  Next comes the well-known story of William "Oriental" Jones' semi-official discovery of the Indo-European language family.  Then it's off to the races, following the traces of the Indo-Europeans every which direction.

Along the way, we learn that it was physicist Thomas Young who proposed the name "Indo-European" for the emerging family, while helping to decipher the Rosetta Stone.  The Indus Valley civilization, which we have discussed for its mysterious, undeciphered script on several occasions here at recently, was a specious factor in the naming of the IE family.

The trail of the search for the homeland then shifts north to the Pontic-Caspian steppe. Beginning around 2015, the Yamnaya Culture (ca. 5300-4600 years ago) of that region, which had already been proposed as the IE homeland on archeological grounds, received support from genetics studies.  Synthesizing the research of Spinney and Mallory, Robinson concludes that  "language played a more influential part in the evolution of human societies than did nationalism, empires and wars."

The reviewer next turns his attention to the opposite side of the coin, the reasons why some languages become extinct while others thrive, which is the focus of Gibb's Rare Tongues.  The stories she tells of how political decisions were made, for example, in Namibia, that proved inimical to the native language of Oahiwambo, which is spoken by half of the population, in favor of English, which has official status, though spoken by less than 5% of the population.

The same kinds of problems endanger languages in many other parts of the world:

In Australia, for example, 93% of Indigenous languages are extinct or soon might be. And in India, 600 languages are endangered, partly because English has become a dominant language; 14 years ago, only 196 were, according to the UN cultural organization UNESCO.

Gibb then moves on to the subject of whistled languages:

Amazingly, these exist on all inhabited continents. They arise from the fact, Gibb notes, that “full sentences in whistled speech are intelligible over distances ten times greater than if you were shouting”. This is possible because, unlike shouting, whistling does not strain the vocal cords and permits powerful volumes over a narrow range of frequencies.

Another subject that is dear to my heart is that of Manchu:

Some languages nearing extinction have been revived. Manchu, an imperial language in China from 1644 to 1912, is now taught at universities across the country. Māori was made an official language of New Zealand in 1987 and is taught in schools. And Gaelic, promoted to an official language in Scotland in 2005, now appears alongside English on Scottish road signs.

Languages can be preserved, but you have to work at it.  Languages do not preserve themselves.  The people who speak them keep languages alive.

Together, these books capture the amazing complexity of languages worldwide, from many contrasting perspectives — including linguistics, archaeology, genetics and anthropology. However, readers must not expect to obtain a settled answer to the long-debated origin of Indo European languages. As a frustrated Mallory jokingly warns: “solving the homeland problem is the academic equivalent of herding cats”.

Typical J. P. Mallory humor.  Superlative!

 

Selected reading

• "Digital Hittite" (3/30/25)
• "A new Indo-European language" (9/26/23)
• "Sally Rooney bucket hat; Hittite, Ugaritic, and the alphabet" (1/7/22)
• "The dissemination of iron and the spread of languages" (11/5/20)
• "PIE *gene- *gwen-" (8/10/23)
• "The origins and affinities of Tocharian" (8/20/23) — important comments by J. P. Mallory, Donald Ringe, and Doug Adams, plus a mini-report on the soon to appear research of Julie Wei
• "Chicken or egg; grammar or language" (1/16/25) — mentions Andrew Robinson's The Story of Writing and Daniel Everett's How Language Began:  The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention
• "The traits of a troll" (5/3/19) — see the last comment
• "Whistled language" (5/26/17)
• "Transcendent Tonality" (11/5/15)

[h.t. Ted McClure]

April 29, 2025 @ 8:32 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Language extinction, Language preservation

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