Gather ’round, fellow monolinguals, and let us pay tribute to the most underrated, overused, and frequently butchered invention in the history of homo sapiens: language. Yes, language. That ancient Wi-Fi signal bouncing around our big wrinkly brains, capable of uniting empires, toppling kings, and creating Twitter beefs that spiral into real-life lawsuits. And now, thanks to Laura Spinney’s brainy new book Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, we finally have the origin story we didn’t know we needed—but clearly deserve. Spoiler alert: it starts in a region currently being shelled.
That’s right. Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the ancient godfather of English, Sanskrit, Greek, Gaelic, and yes, the language you’re currently misusing to read this, started with a ragtag bunch of nomads grazing beefy cattle in the Eastern Ukrainian steppes. Forget cavemen grunting or Egyptians chiseling cryptic bird memes onto walls—real linguistic domination began with the Yamnaya. Picture them: robust, horseback-riding beefcake proto-bros with a fondness for fermented mare’s milk and probably some very strong opinions about tulip bulbs.
Spinney makes the case that PIE’s viral spread is, and I quote, “easily the most important event of the last five millennia in the Old World.” Which is a polite way of saying: screw your pyramids, forget the invention of money, and please stop talking about the wheel like it reinvented humanity. If you can say "mother" in more than one language—or scream it in five during childbirth—you owe it to the linguistic pioneers who somehow turned grunts into grammar.
PIE: The Original Influencer
Before Instagram had influencers spreading avocado toast culture from Brooklyn to Bangkok, PIE was already on a global tour. No ring lights, no hashtags—just a whole lot of consonant clusters. From roughly 4,000 BCE, a language spoken by maybe a hundred livestock-snuggling proto-dudes spread into hundreds of modern tongues used by billions today. That’s legacy. That’s scale. That’s basically the linguistic version of starting a garage band that somehow becomes The Beatles, Mozart, and Bad Bunny all at once.
According to Spinney, PIE’s originators weren’t exactly globe-trotters. The Yamnaya themselves barely ventured outside their tulip-studded steppe zone, but their aggressive linguistic descendants—like the Corded Ware Culture (named for their pottery because apparently archaeologists can’t help themselves)—took it global. They didn’t just colonize through language. Genetic evidence suggests they replaced entire male gene pools. Gentlemen, let’s just say your ancestors weren’t the only thing that got erased from the map.
Of course, Spinney delicately dances around the fact that this "replacement" might’ve involved less-than-charming behavior—think plague-resistant newcomers wiping out Neolithic populations through pandemics, or more unsavory things like murder and, ahem, reproductive monopoly. Nothing says linguistic imperialism like turning someone else’s cultural legacy into a footnote in your syntax tree.
Talking Dead: Languages Without Speakers
Here's the kicker: Proto-Indo-European itself? Never actually heard. It’s a Frankensteinian tongue reconstructed by linguists who apparently get their kicks comparing syllables across centuries. PIE is kind of like that celebrity everyone talks about but no one’s ever actually seen. It has a reconstructed vocabulary of around 1,600 words—barely enough to sustain a decent argument on Reddit.
But if you must hear PIE, some brave soul uploaded a version of the Lord’s Prayer in PIE to YouTube. Why the Lord’s Prayer? Because it doesn’t involve words like “bee,” which the Yamnaya didn’t have and, therefore, didn't talk about. That’s right: no bees, no honey, no chance of Winnie-the-Pooh emerging from this linguistic tree. But they had plenty of words for cows, wheels, and presumably “My tulips, my rules.”
Shamanic Silk Roads and Drunk Dancers
One of the most delightful detours in Spinney’s journey takes us to the Tocharian culture, which somehow ended up in Western China despite being PIE speakers. According to the Chinese, these people were “heavy-drinking, decadent barbarians” who threw peacock feasts and employed more dancing girls than a Vegas revue. And if you're wondering why the English word shaman might have come from these PIE party animals instead of the solemn Sanskrit scholars we were all taught to respect—well, welcome to the linguistic twist ending no one saw coming.
Also, shoutout to the Roma people, whose millennia-long journey across Eurasia can be traced in the borrowed vocabulary they picked up like souvenirs. From Persian “donkey” to other spicy etymologies, it’s like Google Maps for ancient tongues—with the added bonus of no GPS signal loss in the Indus Valley.
Multilingual Mayhem: Then vs. Now
Once upon a time, being multilingual wasn’t just chic—it was required. You needed one language to flirt with your neighbor, another to sacrifice a goat to your gods, and a third to get a decent price on bronze trinkets. It was the original code-switching hustle. Compare that to now, when most Americans can barely order tacos without accidentally asking to sleep with someone’s aunt.
Spinney observes that monolingualism is a modern disease, one that arrived right around the same time as the concept of the nation-state. Turns out, when you start drawing borders and making flags, you also start clinging to your vowels like they’re sacred relics. And even in a world where people fly across continents in sweatpants, languages are now less likely to borrow from one another than they were in the age of ox-carts. Why? Because we’ve become linguistically tribal. Apparently, the more we blur cultural lines, the harder we grip our grammar like it’s the last life preserver on a sinking ship of identity.
Russia, Ukraine, and the PIE-Slinging War
Here’s where Spinney gets spicy. She calls the current war in Ukraine “in part, a war over language.” And she’s not wrong. Putin’s rhetoric is basically a crash course in “Where do my words end and yours begin?” The absurdity? Russian and Ukrainian are both offspring of PIE. It’s like two cousins having a street brawl over who inherited grandma’s silverware, when really she only left behind a broken butter dish and some old yarn.
The irony is thick: the Yamnaya, those proto-sapiens on horses, would’ve had zero interest in nationalism. Their idea of “country” probably stopped at the last cow patty they could smell. Yet here we are, thousands of years later, bombing the literal birthplace of our shared linguistic lineage over modern pride, lines on a map, and weaponized vowels.
Reflections in Bronze and Grammar
In one of her more poetic moments, Spinney references Gabriel Léger, a French artist restoring ancient bronze mirrors. These mirrors once reflected the faces of ancient people—who, much like us, probably stared into them wondering how many gray hairs they had or if their war paint was symmetrical. “We don’t know what they saw,” she writes. But maybe we do.
They saw themselves. Just like we do—scrambling to make sense of a world ruled by words, by stories, by voices echoing from a time before time. Language isn’t just our greatest invention because it helps us negotiate rent increases or ghost people with passive-aggressive emojis. It’s great because it lets us remember, connect, dominate, and dream. And sometimes, yes, declare war.
Final Thought: Language Is a Virus (And You’re Infected)
Spinney’s book Proto is a reminder that the thing we use every day without thinking—our languages—are ancient, chaotic, brutally efficient tools of civilization, subjugation, survival, and song. You speak PIE every time you say “brother,” “mother,” or “wheel.” And no, that doesn’t mean you can put "Fluent in PIE" on your résumé (unless you’re applying to be the world’s most annoying dinner party guest).
Mankind’s greatest invention didn’t come with gears or fire. It came with a tongue. And centuries later, we’re still using it to lie, love, lament, and—most importantly—laugh at our own historical absurdity.
So go ahead. Speak up. You’re just continuing the loud, messy, beautiful, unstoppable ripple that started in the steppe and ended up in your mouth.
