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This book is a deep dive into the origins and spread of the Indo-European language family, which today includes everything from English and Spanish to Hindi and Persian. Spinney weaves together linguistics, archaeology, and genetics to trace how a single ancient tongue, Proto-Indo-European, likely spoken on the steppes of Ukraine around 5,000 years ago, became the foundation for nearly half the world’s languages. Despite the subject matter, Spinney avoids dry academic jargon, instead offering vivid anecdotes—like how the word for "mother" echoes across languages from Sanskrit (*matar*) to Latin (*mater*)—to illustrate linguistic connections. She also highlights the detective work behind these discoveries, from 19th-century linguists spotting patterns to modern DNA analysis revealing ancient migrations.

That said, the sheer scope of the topic means some sections feel rushed, and the lack of maps or timelines (at least in the review copy) can make it hard to track the sprawling movements of peoples and languages. A few theories are presented as more settled than they actually are, and I wished for more critical engagement with debates in the field. Still, "Proto" is a compelling introduction for anyone curious about why we speak the languages we do. It’s a reminder that words, like genes, carry hidden histories—and that the echoes of a long-lost language still shape our world today.

Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for the opportunity to review a temporary digital ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

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Proto follows the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language evolved into a language family that is spoken by almost 50% of Earth's inhabitants. Clearly, Spinney thoroughly researched the topic and provides readers with a work that can easily be followed by the general reader with interest in the topic or an academic looking to delve deeper into the subject material.
I enjoyed the writing style and the narrative method employed throughout Proto. I learned more than I thought I would when I requested the dARC of this book.
I would have preferred maps to help clarify the written text with something visual, but I am sure that is addressed in other editions.
This is a great book for readers interested in language, history, civilizations, and the human experience.


Thank you NetGalley and publisher for the dARC of this work in exchange for my honest review.
I have requested that this book be the purchased by our campus library to add to our collection.

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We’re communicating right now in English, which itself derived from Old English, a Germanic language, with contributions from French and Latin, Romance languages. By the 19th century, it had become apparent all these languages, and many more, were a very large and widely dispersed language family.

In Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, Laura Spinney seeks to understand proto-Indo-European and how it became so widely distributed throughout first Asia and Europe, and eventually, the world.

The author tells the story both of the language development itself as well as the story of how we have come to understand it this way. After introducing the theme, the author brings us back four thousand years so we might meet the Yamnaya, a steppe people who were not numerically that strong or in many ways civilizationally compelling, and, in fact, a smaller group on the periphery of what passed for civilization in the Copper/Early Bronze Age in Eurasia. The author related the very possible climactic trends and human developments which led to a major reordering of how people throughout Europe and Asia spoke, leading to the Yamnaya’s descendants distributing themselves widely through Europe and parts of the Middle East and central Asia. The Yamnaya are believed to be the first to speak Indo-European, and the language would spread from there.

The author then went through the various branches of the Indo-European family tree. Hittite is reckoned as perhaps a cousin language, one which broke off around the time of the Yamnaya, and its story is fully told. The author also considers the Indo-Iranic family, the Celtic/Iberian etc. family, the Greek family, the Italic/Romance family, and the Slavic family of Indo-European languages.

In all of these stories the author provides the latest in linguistic and archaeological research. We are shown how the languages relate to one another, and how we can tell when languages spin off or develop into new ones based on which words are maintained in common and which words are coined or developed on the basis of contact with other languages, either fellow Indo-European languages or the languages of the people with whom Indo-European speakers came into contact.

The author presents the story of the advancement of Indo-European as the unlikely result of plucky groups of people who are resourceful and whose language becomes the primary tongue of Europe and a good portion of Asia. It’s an understandably compelling story: if you surveyed the state of the world and its languages around 2500 BCE, you would not have put your money on the Yamnaya language as the one which would predominate, and with the likely diversity in language families, you would not have necessarily expected it to become as dominant as it has in Europe and portions of Asia.

But it would also be impossible to deny how Indo-European languages are, at their core, colonial. The people who originally spoke them were not numerous; it would seem they traveled, took over in terms of prominence if not power, and whole groups of people not originally biologically related would end up speaking Indo-European languages. What we can perhaps see happening in Britannia to England in the first millennium BCE with the shift from Brittonic to English might well have been playing out with proto-Indo-European in many parts of Europe beforehand: a shift in the dominant culture leads to a shift in language, even among people who were not ancestrally part of the dominant language culture.

However you want to look at how it came to be, what cannot be denied is how English, and most European languages, are part of our steppe ancestry, and powerful testimony to how steppe people and their invasions have powerfully shaped the lives and cultures of Europe and many parts of Asia. This book is a highly recommended resource to better understand the Indo-European language family.

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A loyal Word Smarts reader knows that English is a melting pot of languages from around the world, but what I learned from reading “Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global” is that English shares a root with the languages of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran, along with Welsh, Irish, Celtic, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, and the Germanic languages, the Slavic and Baltic tongues, and all the offshoots of Latin. Language has existed for millennia longer than written documentation, but thanks to recent developments in genetics and archaeology, historical linguists are now able to piece together more of the story of how languages spread around the globe. “Proto” doesn’t read like a textbook, but instead guides the reader through a fascinating linguistic journey. (Recommendation sent to readers of WordSmarts.com email newsletter)

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Imaginings About What a Shared Language’s Origin Could Have Been, While Avoiding Crediting India for the Indo-European Branch
Laura Spinney, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (Dublin: William Collins, April 24, 2025). Hardback: £22.00. 336pp. ISBN: 979-0-00-862652-5.
***
“One ancient language transformed our world. This is its story. As the planet emerged from the last ice age, a language was born between Europe and Asia. This ancient tongue, which we call Proto-Indo-European, soon exploded out of its cradle, changing and fragmenting as it went, until its offspring were spoken from Scotland to China. Today those descendants constitute the world’s largest language family, the thread that connects disparate cultures: Dante’s Inferno to the Rig Veda, The Lord of the Rings to the love poetry of Rumi. Indo-European languages are spoken by nearly half of humanity. How did this happen? Laura Spinney set out to answer that question, retracing the Indo-European odyssey across continents and millennia. 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 languages far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the scientists on a thrilling mission to retrieve those lost languages: the linguists, archaeologists and geneticists who have reconstructed this ancient diaspora. What they have learned has vital implications for our modern world, as people and their languages are on the move again.”
I have been working with linguistics recently, and have been wondering about why humans tend to borrow or steal other peoples’ ideas versus developing something new. The relationship between Indian and European languages is also one that needs to be explored further to bring cultures that seem desperate to the proximity where they started on the Silk Road whereby shippers began to move languages and goods around the globe long before some parts were “discovered” by European authors.
The preface begins by wondering at the amazing feats of modern archeology that can “determine the hair, skin and eye color of the people who we buried” long ago. Then, finding some prehistoric people played a “ball game” is said to have led the author to the study of prehistoric language. This is an especially difficult field because “prehistory” is defined as a time before written language, so it’s a contradiction of terms.
The Introduction also has an interesting opening in a section on “Ariomania”. It reminds readers that it was not only languages that Europeans borrowed from India, but also religion, as India’s “most powerful god” was Father Sky, Dyauh pita, in Sanskrit, who was borrowed by Greeks in Zeus pater, and then by Romans in Iuppiter, and in Old Norse Vikings variant of Tyr, or Old English Tiu. My own research into Renaissance ghostwriters suggested that some of the echoes during the Renaissance resulted because authors were forging manuscripts they were assigning to earlier times, and thus compressing the speed of borrowing, or editing of such names from one culture to the next. European historians deliberately confused the source of these borrowings by insisting pagan or Old Norse or Indian religions were strange and different, whereas Greco-Roman religions were founding for European culture. Thus, it is important for books like this one to review the lineage of these theologies and languages to remind us where our culture is borrowed from.
The uncertainty about just when things were written or forged does make me question how this book could have arrived at any clear findings regarding the Lingua obscura that is discussed at the start of the first chapter: “Genesis”. The chapter begins with theological speculations about a great-flood that turn into geological evidence of merging of seas. Then, a history is given of early farmers coming out of hunter-gatherers. The clash between “herders and farmers” moving into each other’s territories is said to have been a clash in the Black Sea and Caucasus region that was likely to generate a first murder, or violent clashes that apparently generated the first “Indo-European languages” (40-1). This is too abstract for my taste. Why would these fighters need to write each other letters? Why is this happening in the Caucasus and not on the border with India?
After a digression about some archeologist or gold digger, there is finally a mention of a giant gold find in a grave in 1974 with “bracelets, rings, a sceptre, a penis sheath, even a gold-spangled hat”: this suggests to the author it was “a chief or priest” (43). These artifacts are attributed to the Hamangia: European farmers. But there is no mention yet of signs of a language in these finds. Some pages later, the author argues that across “recorded history” humans have usually been “trading in high-value goods” with “an effective means of communication”, with a shared language-of-commerce (50). The rational argument here is to note that Indian traders must have traveled by-ship or by land into Europe and brought Indian languages with them, which were bastardized by Europeans when they were away. But this is not the argument given, as Europeans are claimed to have possessed unique languages before a common language was introduced by merchants (51-2). This whole chapter is basically a fiction, without any factual evidence in the remains to prove where this common language came from, or when. This lack of certainty is not acknowledged but rather is covered with speculations that are presented as history, without citations.
The second chapter again begins with dreamy geographic description, instead of with facts about languages. There are digressive descriptions of trips taken over the steppe, or to museums: all irrelevant.
This book is another example of unreadable history. The author seems to have deliberately coated the few inserted facts with flighty digressions, and barely founded speculations. Too many historical fictions have been written on this subject for us to need another one. I do not recommend diving into this book unless a reader is closely familiar with this subject and searches precisely for what they are looking for to help their unique research: so probably a searchable ebook version would be best.
Pennsylvania Literary Journal: Spring 2025 issue: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-spring-2025

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While I have a lot of interest for this subjet, the format of this book could not hold my interest. I found myself having to re-read many pages and it was hard to finish.

I can tell it was well researched though. A lot of work was put into this novel.

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Ethnologue (an amazing source for linguistics information and data) reports that, as of 2025, 3.39 billion people speak a language in the Indo-European family. Before the colonization of the Western hemisphere, Indo-European languages were spoken from Ireland to India, from Scandinavia and Russia to Spain. In Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, Laura Spinney follows the threads of linguistic reconstruction, genetic research, and archaeology to document what we think we know about Proto-Indo-European, the language that birthed descendants as diverse as Gaelic, Sanskrit, Estonian, English, and Bengali. (Ethnologue cites 455 languages in the Indo-European family.)

As far as linguists know, Proto-Indo-European may have been spoken somewhere in what is now Ukraine between six and four thousand years ago. We have no direct evidence of the language. Writing hadn’t been invented yet. The language was first proposed by linguists like Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn (1600s), Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux (1700s), and William Jones (1700s). These men (among others) spotted similarities between languages as disparate as Sanskrit, Lithuanian, and other languages spoken in Europe, India, and points in between. Two of the best examples of the similarities they spotted are the words for “mother” and “father”.

Documenting examples like these and creating sound change laws (like the change from a “p” sound to an “f” sound like the one you can see in the example for “father” above) have helped linguists create a family tree for the Indo-European language and reconstruct hundreds of words that might have existed in Proto-Indo-European.

Spinney focuses more on the genetic research and archaeology parts of the Indo-European family story. She is much more interested in talking about how the language and its descendants came to be spoken in so many places, by so many people. Most evidence points to a homeland in the steppe land in what is now Ukraine. From there, the language may have migrated to the Anatolian peninsula before splitting into the Indo-Iranian branch and the European branches. (One branch, Tocharian, ended up being spoken in the remote Taklamakan Desert in what is now China before it died out.) People took their languages with them when they migrated, went to war, and traded. It’s amazing what scientists and archaeologists have been able to discover in the bones and artifacts left behind.

That said, Spinney is clear that there are still a lot of open debates in the story of Proto-Indo-European: is the homeland in Eurasia? Why did Indo-European languages outcompete so many other languages in their various paths? (Basque is one of the few non-Indo-European languages traditionally spoken in Europe and is, interestingly, a linguistic isolate.) How did the Tocharians end up all the way over there? What can we glean about the culture and beliefs of Proto-Indo-European speakers?

Because of these questions—and the very light coverage of linguistics in general—Proto is more of an introduction than an in-depth exploration. It’s not a perfect guide. There were two errors about different varieties of English in a footnote early in the book, so I read this book in close proximity to my library’s website and Wikipedia so that I could fact-check as I read. I am comfortable recommending to curious readers who want an overview. It certainly provides enough background in the way of terminology and names to help guide further research.

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In Proto, Laura Spinney takes us on a journey that spans entire continents as well as several millennia. Proto-Indo-European probably originated from a language spoken by a small group of ancient Eastern Europeans, and over time its offspring languages gained strongholds from south and central Asia through the majority of Europe. Hindi, Russian, Farsi, Latin, Greek, Irish, Lithuanian, English… For a long time, certain scholars (including Dante Alighieri way back in the 14th century) have noted puzzling similarities across multiple languages that seem to indicate long-forgotten relationships between their speakers. However, it wasn’t easy to prove ancient interactions until recently, when DNA evidence could finally be examined. These days, it seems like there’s something new to learn about the ancient world every time you turn around!

Spinney lays out the most recent physical evidence of human migration and linguistic evidence of language contact, and she does a good job of offering multiple theories before focusing on her own. There’s still a lot that we don’t know about how, when, and why ancient peoples migrated and why one language survived when another didn’t, but she pieces the puzzle together in a thoughtful, compelling way. I found the section on Celtic languages particularly fascinating, since that’s part of my own ancestry. For instance, she offers some interesting theories on how the Irish language came to be related to the language of a people whose DNA the Irish don’t share.

I also appreciated that she clearly researched the heck out of each of the languages she discusses. Each section is full of literary references as well as general linguistic nerdery, so I couldn’t have been happier. It’s fun to see how words are passed from one language to another slightly changed, like an ancient game of Telephone. And the words that one language shares with another tell us so much about the speakers’ lives. I found it all captivating.

Great book, loved every page of it. I highly recommend it to my fellow language nerds!

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This was well-researched and entertaining. The author introduces three schools of thought that will lead our exploration into the much-sought-after Proto-Indo-European language: linguistics, archeology, and genetics. It is important to remember that the author does not have certifications in these disciplines, but does do a good job of including experts in the field.

I really enjoy reading about historical and comparative linguistics. There was a lot of fascinating information in here, but it felt like more of a pop-sci interpretation of events rather than a fully realized hypothesis regarding Proto-Indo-European.

I think that “educated guesswork” and “controlled speculation” could be said of quite a few claims made and that the foundation of Spinney’s work is based on unconfirmed hypotheses. I think that Proto is a very important body of work that brings together the best and most modern scientific knowledge that we have regarding historical linguistics, archeology and genetics, but I am hesitant to accept Spinney’s hypothesis until further analysis and the test of time have completed their due.

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The language born between Europe and Asia is what we call Proto-Indo-European. Today, it's the world’s largest language family. This book details how the language spoken by nearly half of humanity came to be.
I learned a lot while reading this book. I didn't realize how or why ancient ancestors moved from place to place, sometimes taking years to arrive at their destination.
The writing is a bit dry in places. And lack of puncuatation distracted me. However, the content offers an insightful look at why we speak the languages we do. I gained a greater appreciation for the folks who developed language over the centuries. As the author states, "Some argue that without language there is no reasoning, others that there is no consciousness. But besides the desire to reach out to strangers, there’s another one that has deep roots in us : the desire to belong to our own group."

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Today, though there are thousands of languages spoken all over the world, nearly half the world’s population speaks, as one of their languages, a language that is a descendant of Proto-Indo-European, one of the five major language families (Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, Austronesian). Early well-known descendants of Proto-Indo-European were Sanskrit, ancient Greek, Latin and Norse. Thousands of languages and dialects later, contemporary language descendants include English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, the Slavic languages, and more. (But not Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, or that orphan language Basque.)

Spinney grabs the reader right away with examples of Sanskrit words that are close to modern languages. Then it’s off to the Black Sea, more specifically the steppe of modern-day Ukraine, which she points to as the cradle of Proto-Indo-European. She posits that starting around 5,000 years ago the language spread, transplanting, integrating, and changing as hunter-gatherers and farmers came together, as armies moved in conquest, as traders sought new buyers and sellers, as receding glaciers opened up new land for use, until in only a thousand years, languages derived from Proto-Indo-European were spoken from as far north as Ireland to as far south as India.

While language development can be analyzed by comparing words and grammar, a major advancement in studies came through the ability to conduct analyses of ancient DNA. An electrifying part of the book is a scientist’s DNA analysis finding that two individuals, probably second cousins or first cousins once removed, lived over a thousand miles apart thousands of years ago. That’s an impressive move of peoples and languages at that time.

Here is how Spinney organizes her book:

Chapter 1: The Black Sea its world after the glaciers receded
Chapter 2: The radiation of Proto-Indo-European beyond its birthplace
Chapter 3: The Anatolian story
Chapter 4: The Tocharian story
Chapter 5: The Italic, Celtic and Germanic languages
Chapter 6: Eastward expansion, leading to the Indo-Iranian branch
Chapter 7: The Baltic and Slavic languages
Chapter 8: Armenian, Albanian, and Greek
Conclusion

The choice to organize the book by language groups makes sense. It does mean that Spinney has to revisit history over and over again, which can be a little confusing at times. It’s a well-researched book, very dense in facts and history, and she manages to cover a lot of ground in only 336 pages.

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Proto is a fascinating deep dive into the origins of the Indo-European language family, blending history, linguistics, and archaeology in an engaging way. Laura Spinney does an excellent job making complex research accessible, taking readers on a journey through time and across continents. I especially enjoyed how she connected ancient languages to modern ones, showing their lasting influence. At times, the dense detail can be a bit overwhelming, but overall, it’s a compelling and insightful read for anyone interested in language and history.

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Fascinating, well-researched book. In Proto, author Laura Spinney (with assists from the various other academicians she mentions by name throughout) takes a sweeping, multidisciplinary approach to historical linguistics, attempting to trace the origin, spread, and evolution of the vast Indo-European language family from its ancient beginnings through to modern times. Because of the sometimes meandering nature of the writing -- and the topic itself -- I occasionally had a hard time keeping track of which bits are solid fact (such as DNA analysis of human remains from different archaeological sites), which bits are widely-accepted points of agreement, and which bits are still mainly theoretical, but I was thoroughly engrossed and learned things I never knew I needed to know about the history of Eurasia. I've been both entertained and educated!

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Are you looking for your next thought provoking read? Check out Proto by Laura Spinney. It makes you think.

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It's been a long (long) time since I took a linguistics course, and it was interesting to read a book about the current multidisciplinary approaches to tracing the history of Proto-Indo-European. The connections between linguistics, archeology, and genetics are really cool to read about. The book is engaging and accessible enough for an interested lay reader, although I can't speak to how well or accurately Spinney explains the current state of the field. The hypotheses Spinney describes for relationships between and among various ancient and modern languages are fascinating.

That said, I desperately wished for some visuals—maps, a timeline, something to hang my understanding on other than the convoluted migrations and changes Spinney describes. At times, the writing seems to jump from topic to topic and location to location in a way that left me unsure of where we were geographically, temporally, or culturally. I also found myself wishing Spinney had spent more time talking about the researchers she spoke with—who are the people tracing these histories? What are their stories? That's a bit outside the scope of the book, but it might have humanized some of the research further.

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I gave this review copy a good-faith try, but I had to give up. The author interrogates nothing in the fields she's reporting on; she just repeats likely sounding stories and tidbits as if they were reliable scientific findings. No anecdote is too good not to include. In addition, for a book on language, the writing is surprisingly awkward.

Linguistics is an endlessly fascinating topic, and deserves a writer who can really grapple with the material. Spinney is not that author.

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This is an excellent book about a topic not too many people think about. In its own way it was very reflective. It made me give thoughts I would never have otherwise.

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