In the summer of 1930, as construction was about to begin on the mount for the blast furnace at the future Azovstal metalworks in Mariupol, Soviet apparatchiks discovered what looked like an ancient burial there. They called in an archaeologist, Mykola Makarenko, and once he had confirmed that the burial was indeed of rare antiquity they asked him to carry out a rescue excavation.
Makarenko quickly realised that he was dealing with a large communal grave dating back to the late Stone Age. Burial after burial came to light, dozens of them, laid out in neat rows, their heads facing alternately east and west. Among the rich grave goods that had been buried with them, including boars’ tusks and beads of porphyry and mother-of-pearl, his practised eye detected influences from Siberia and the Caucasus. As his team toiled, the work on the plant went on around them. ‘Every day we were requested to hasten our excavation works,’ he wrote. ‘Crowds of workers surrounded the place of our work. They arrived here by hundreds from different factories and were interested in what they saw of our excavations. We were finally obliged to build a fence of barbed wire in order to prevent them from hindering us in our work, and to fix special hours for their inspection of the excavated material under the guidance of our expedition members.’
Besides the communal grave they discovered a younger burial of three individuals. It looked as if some later prehistoric people had returned, respectfully, to bury their dead in the place of their ancestors. Makarenko reasoned that they might also have been attracted by the site’s natural defences. It was on a peninsula that was bound on two sides by the River Kalmius, on the third by the Sea of Azov and on the fourth by a ravine. In mid-October, after two months of intense activity, the archaeologists packed up their tools and left. They took with them one of the older graves and the younger, triple grave. These they deposited at Mariupol’s museum of local history. The rest of the burial ground was razed to make way for the plant.
In 1938, for opposing the demolition of a medieval monastery in Kyiv, Makarenko was executed by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. Seven decades passed, and the graves at the Mariupol museum were forgotten. Science advanced. Techniques were developed for extracting and reading ancient DNA. In 2010, Ukrainian archaeologists rediscovered the graves, and word of their existence reached the Ukrainian-born geneticist Alexey Nikitin in the United States. It took him another decade to persuade the museum’s curators to part with some of the skeletal material, but they eventually agreed to let him have a few bones and teeth for analysis.
That was in November 2021. The following February, Russian forces invaded Ukraine and laid siege to Mariupol. Ukrainian troops defending the city retreated to the Azovstal plant with its man-made defences in the form of tunnels and bunkers, and its natural defences in the form of a river, a ravine and the Azov Sea. Thousands died in the fighting, some of whom were buried in a mass grave at the edge of the city. By the time the survivors surrendered in May, the metalworks had been almost obliterated, as had the history museum. All that remained of the ancient burial site, besides Makarenko’s detailed notes, were the bones and teeth in Nikitin’s custody.
His analyses of the chemical composition of those bones and teeth confirmed Makarenko’s intuition that far-reaching interactions were at play in the Mariupol cemetery. Some of those people had travelled long distances in their lives. The sequence of burials had, Nikitin suspected, captured a key juncture in the genetic formation of the Yamnaya, the moment when a mix of Ukrainian and Siberian ancestries received an infusion of genes from the Caucasus. Only genomic analysis could confirm that, but Nikitin couldn’t extract any usable DNA from the material, and there was no hope of getting more samples from Mariupol now. The prehistoric graveyard had gone, and its secrets with it.
It would be an understatement to say that Russia’s war on Ukraine has had a detrimental effect on research into the Indo-European languages, whose cradle many scholars believe lies between the two countries. Landmines now infest Ukrainian soil like lethal spores, placing archaeological sites off-limits if they haven’t already been destroyed. Some Ukrainian archaeologists have gone to fight, others have attempted to protect their cultural heritage. Russian scholars, even those who have spoken out against the war, have been frozen out of international collaborations and conferences, and no more samples have come out of the war zone since hostilities began. After a few decades of openness and collaboration between old Cold War enemies, channels of communication have frozen again.
And yet, despite the many practical and political obstacles, despite tensions over the ownership of data and the authorship of papers, new information continues to be published, based on materials that were collected before the war. For many the mission seems more urgent than ever, given that this war is, in part, a war over language – over where the russophone sphere begins and ends. Historical linguists carry on their work more or less unimpeded, piecing together the past, not only of Indo-European, but also of the other great language dynasties with which it has crossed paths. The stories of Uralic, Sino-Tibetan and Afro-Asiatic, to name just three, are turning out to be just as complex and fascinating.
There are many questions still to answer, not least, what caused a band of brothers to head out from their ancestral valley on the Pontic-Caspian steppe and invent a new way of life – one that would propel their genes and dialects throughout the Old World? The evidence that might help scholars answer that question has eluded them so far, but it’s not impossible that the war could bring it to light. A site called Mykhailivka, source of the oldest Yamnaya samples to date, was partially flooded when the Kakhovka Dam was completed on the Dnieper in 1956. The destruction of the dam in June 2023 unleashed a human and environmental disaster, but Mykhailivka is reported to be dry once again.
Some things have been established beyond much doubt. The people who spoke the parent of all modern Indo-European languages carried a blend of ancestries that came together within an international trade network. They were nomads, migrants, who spread that language wherever they went. There was nothing inherently successful about their language. If they managed to impose it on the populations they encountered, it was because it enshrined a suite of values, myths and conventions that allowed them to expand and adapt. They thrived, and others wished to emulate them. Many of the offspring of that first Indo-European language died. The ones that survived were those whose speakers proved adaptable in their turn. They did not stay the same, nor did their languages. That was the secret of their success.
My husband’s name is Richard, though he sometimes writes it the Polish way: Ryszard. His parents were forced to leave Poland in the dark days of the Second World War, and for many years they expected to return. They met, married and raised their children in London. Richard grew up speaking Polish at home and English outside it. The first time that he and I went to Poland together, I remember the curious looks that darted his way. Finally a woman said what, presumably, others were thinking: ‘You speak without an accent but there’s something odd about your Polish, I can’t put my finger on it.’ Richard told her what it was: their two versions of the Polish language had parted ways in 1940. His branded him the son of émigrés.
The human compulsion to communicate is overwhelming. It was there even before sapiens. Children born deaf have invented sign languages to escape what one researcher has called the ‘abysmal loneliness’ of life without communication.1 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.
People change languages just by using them. Sometimes they do so unconsciously, by reproducing a sound that they have heard infinitesimally altered. Sometimes they do so consciously, to imitate or differentiate themselves from others. The accumulation of these conscious and unconscious changes causes languages to split. There is some evidence that languages change most rapidly just after they split, as the two groups assert their diverging identities. From then on, the moment a newcomer opens their mouth, they reveal whether they belong to ‘us’ or ‘them’.
In Belfast, a student called Kacey told me that when young people in Ballymena, County Antrim, say they’re ‘skundered’, they mean they’re confused. Elsewhere in Northern Ireland, to be skundered is to be embarrassed. She didn’t know how or why the difference had come about, but it clearly set the youth of Ballymena apart. Most of the time such differences don’t matter. We all have a number of identities. A person can feel both Basque and Spanish, both Kurdish and Iranian, from Ballymena and from (Northern) Ireland, from London and from Poland. The identity that comes to the fore depends on the situation, but it’s not something to go to war over. Until it is.
In the Bible, Judges 12:5–6, the men of Gilead identified their Ephraimite enemies by making them utter a single Hebrew word meaning ‘stream’: ‘Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan.’ Linguist Laada Bilaniuk reports that since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian troops have been using their own shibboleth to identify undercover Russian operatives. The word is palianytsia, which means a loaf of bread. It may also have served as a shibboleth in the First and Second World Wars, Bilaniuk says. The difference in pronunciation didn’t go away in between times, but Ukrainians and Russians didn’t pay attention to it. The similarities between their languages, which are great, mattered more.2
Language shapes identity and identity shapes language. But to get at group membership in prehistory scholars have to rely on pots and bones, and admit that the finer distinctions escape them. They can be sure that prehistoric people yearned to belong, and vetted strangers as we do, but they can’t know exactly what notion of ‘us’ they were guarding. In his book Who We Are And How We Got Here, David Reich describes a contretemps he had over just this issue. It was 2008, and having identified an influx of steppe ancestry to India over three thousand years ago, he and his Indian co-workers, Lalji Singh and Kumarasamy Thangaraj, disagreed about what to call the people who had brought it. Reich wanted the label ‘West Eurasians’, but Singh and Thangaraj pointed out that there was no way of knowing that the immigrants themselves had actually come all the way from West Eurasia. Though they certainly carried West Eurasian ancestry, and this set them apart from the existing population of India, they might have regarded themselves as Bactrians, or Gandharans (two ancient civilisations of Central and South Asia), or even Harappans. The only certainty was that they had once been there, where their remains were found. Reich conceded the point, and the group agreed on the label ‘Ancestral North Indians’ (as opposed to India’s existing population, ‘Ancestral South Indians’).
This question of identity matters, because if scientists can’t know how prehistoric people saw themselves, neither can anyone else. Yet there are plenty who would claim to do so for political purposes. The best preserved site of the Sintashta culture – the culture that many scholars associate with the Proto-Indo-Iranian language – is called Arkaim. It has been declared a national monument in Russia, where it is sometimes referred to as the Aryan homeland. Arkaim is central to the revival of the notion, dear to some in that country, of a Russian world (Russkiy mir) from which sprang all the living eastern branches of the Indo-European language family – Baltic and Slavic, even Indic and Iranic. (In the early 1990s, soon after Arkaim was excavated, you could see a poster at the entrance to the site that read ‘Zarathustra was born here’.) There’s no doubt that Russian president Vladimir Putin subscribes to this view. In 2021 he published an essay in which he stated explicitly that his goal was to reunite a once supposedly russophone sphere. But it’s not just Putin’s mistake. Nationalists across the globe are projecting national identities back on to a world that didn’t know them. Prehistoric people undoubtedly had identities as complex and multi-layered as ours. We don’t know what they were, but we can be sure that nowhere among the layers was the nation-state.
As I was beginning the research for this book, I stumbled on the work of a French artist called Gabriel Léger. He had recently completed a project that involved repolishing antique bronze mirrors from Greece, Rome and the Etruscan heartland, so that you could see your face in a surface that, twenty-five centuries ago, had reflected someone else’s. The idea stayed with me. In fact I was reminded of it constantly as I travelled around (you’d be surprised, or perhaps you wouldn’t, by how many tarnished mirrors there are in the archaeological museums of the world). We know that ancient people looked at themselves in mirrors. We don’t know what they saw.
By the seventh century of the Common Era, Indo-Iranian languages dominated a strip of the Earth that swept from the southern Caucasus to Assam at the north-eastern tip of India. The Turkish peninsula was still home to Greek, Anatolian and Armenian, but the broad delineations of Europe’s linguistic landscape looked much as they do today: Romance in the south and west, Germanic in the north and centre, Celtic on the edge. Part of the centre and much of the east were dominated by the Slavic tongues, the Baltic languages were shrinking towards the eponymous sea, and somewhere in the Babel of the Balkans one could make out Albanian and Greek.
The linguistic frontiers would continue to shift, and there was plenty of change to come within them. The imminent Arab conquests – which extended both east and west of the Arabian peninsula – would have varying success in supplanting the languages of the conquered peoples, like the Roman invasions before them and the Mongol invasions after them, but they would leave none of them unaltered. From the eleventh century Anatolia would receive an infusion of Seljuk Turks, whose ancestors hailed from the Altai Mountains, and they would gradually impose their Turkic tongue. The Jewish diaspora would create blends of Hebrew and Indo-European, of which the best known are Yiddish (a Germanic language) and Ladino (a Romance language derived from Old Spanish). And in the twelfth century, a thousand years after they left India, the Roma finally reached Europe.
What is striking about these linguistic encounters is that, as far as the data allow us to tell, the outcome was different in each case. It’s hardly surprising that the linguistic impact of immigration depends on the relative size of the host and incoming populations, how long the immigrants stay and whether they come in peace or violence. But linguists know that many other factors play a role too, including immunity to infectious disease; religion; house prices; job openings; education; roads; and much, much more.
‘Once it is realised that the direction in which languages change is at the mercy of the arbitrary events that shake the lives of their speakers, the futility of searching for natural or even universal tendencies in language change becomes evident,’ linguist Peter Schrijver has observed. ‘This is a sobering thought.’ Indeed it is. But it might not hold for very much longer. At the moment, historical linguists build their family trees on the basis of shared vocabulary. They would like to be able to integrate other components of language – notably sound and grammar – to understand how language changes as an ensemble over time, but the sheer volume of information involved has precluded that until now. Artificial intelligence may be a double-edged sword, but it excels at finding patterns in large bodies of data (what brilliant polyglots like Dante did for us, when the data were fewer). It will make that goal achievable, and then it will make it possible to explore in detail how the circumstances in which human groups meet affect the languages that their grandchildren will speak. Linguists will begin to discern rules governing language change, which will become increasingly predictable.
Until then, there will continue to be disagreement over whether all languages are born equal. Take the creoles, of which several dozen are spoken around the world, including French-based Haitian Creole, English-based Jamaican Patois and Goa Portuguese Creole, which as its name suggests is based on Portuguese. Many creoles emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when Europeans exported their languages to their colonies around the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. They have traditionally been regarded as slightly less than full languages, simplified and then recomplexified versions of the ones spoken by the predominantly white settlers: not exactly new. But some argue that this view comes loaded with nineteenth-century prejudice, and that creolisation is simply language genesis by another name.
The transformations that certain Romance and Germanic languages underwent on colonial plantations are not so different from the one that German underwent when it came to England in the fifth century, according to this view. British Celts, enslaved or at least relegated to second-class citizenship by the incoming Anglo-Saxons, tried to speak German and produced English instead. French was what came out of the mouths of Germanic-speaking Franks when they took up Latin, and not classical Latin but the vulgar form already bent out of shape by the Gauls. Aside from the fact that each arose in a specific historical context, and that creoles were rarely written down, some see no difference.
Starting in the 1980s, one imperial language began to nose ahead of the field, and then to lap the others. English has been, so far, the sole beneficiary of the new era of globalisation, the first truly global language. Some have gone so far as to brand it a ‘killer’, on the grounds that it has driven many smaller languages to extinction, but that is not a label that sits easily with everyone.3 Salikoko Mufwene, a Congo-born linguist at the University of Chicago, points out that English has expanded mainly as a lingua franca. It may have squeezed other lingua francas, such as Swahili in Africa or Malay in Asia, but it hasn’t dented the indigenous languages that are spoken day to day in those places. The ‘killer’ label reflects a very Eurocentric outlook, Mufwene says, because it is Europe that has made a speciality of monolingualism. In much of the rest of the world, stable bilingualism or even multilingualism is still the norm.
Besides, English is simultaneously diverging into varieties that may one day be unrecognisable as the same language. So is English killing, or is it dying, or is it somehow doing both at once? It is true that there are more and more varieties of English, says Australian linguist Nicholas Evans, but it’s unlikely to go the way of Latin, which exploded in a starburst we call Romance. Few in the late Roman Empire could read or write, and ordinary people living at opposite ends of that empire were not in direct contact with each other. The centrifugal forces pulling their vernaculars apart had no centripetal force to counteract them. Thanks to television, the internet and social media, the speakers of different English vernaculars are exposed to each other’s speech, and to a standard written form of the language. Though it’s difficult to predict a language’s future, Evans says, English could well settle into a state of diglossia, where a gulf exists between the shared written form and the many spoken varieties, but the two bind each other together into a single tongue.
These debates matter, in part, because they have a bearing on the question of language erosion. Of the roughly seven thousand languages that are spoken in the world today, nearly half are considered endangered. Some assessments suggest that fifteen hundred could perish by the end of this century, and attempts at resuscitating the dying ones have proved, by certain measures, disappointing. The shining exception is Hebrew, which was reclaimed in unique circumstances (the birth of the modern state of Israel). But despite decades of intensive language-teaching and strong grassroots support, fewer than twenty per cent of Welsh people spoke Welsh in 2022, and the number had shrunk over the previous decade. Welsh is considered the healthiest of the surviving Celtic languages. The Irish that is being reinvigorated in Ireland is, experts say, heavily influenced by English.
so many languages have fallen
off of the edge of the world
into the dragon’s mouth …4
Not everybody finds these trends discouraging. Some point out that in prehistory, a language at the peak of its health had as few as a thousand speakers. Revival shouldn’t be measured by number of recruits, therefore, but by the extent to which the language is the vehicle of a vibrant culture, and whether young people are taking it up. It’s inevitable, too, that a language that has been reclaimed or reinvigorated should differ from its original form; that’s evolution. (The Israeli-born linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann argues that instead of Hebrew being revived, a new, Hebrew-European hybrid language was born. He calls it Israeli.)
Keeping endangered languages alive seems an indisputably good thing, if it’s what their speakers want, and language activists are getting better at it. They’ve understood that the solution isn’t simply to plough ever more resources into teaching. First they have to work out why people are abandoning the languages, then they have to address the inequalities that are causing them to do so. Language is a tool: it lives for as long as it’s useful, for as long as it opens doors for its speakers and equips them to improve their lives. And while nobody denies that language deaths outnumber language births at present, it’s important to take any numbers attached to the erosion phenomenon with a pinch of salt. Because language is so entwined with identity, any tally is at least partly subjective. Languages are changing on their speakers’ lips as I write. Since most of those changes go unrecorded and unstudied, and linguists can’t agree on what constitutes language genesis, the deaths may have been exaggerated at the expense of the births. It’s time we took note of those hubs which, like hot vents at the bottom of the sea, have been churning out new linguistic life for decades now, and asked: are we on the brink of a linguistic renaissance?
Tacked to the wall of the car hire office in Varna is a map. Between the city of Burgas to the south and the Turkish border, an area has been hatched red. The accompanying text warns clients: don’t pick up hitchhikers here. Bulgaria’s border with Türkiye, most of which is now protected by a metal fence, also marks the European Union’s south-eastern frontier. Only a hundred kilometres (sixty miles) beyond it lies the Bosporus, bridgehead for intercontinental migrants since the Stone Age. For four hundred years up until the Second World War, in the colonial period, the net flow of people was away from Europe. Since that war, it has been towards Europe. Today the migrants come predominantly from Syria, Palestine, Iran and Iraq; from Afghanistan and Pakistan; from North and West Africa.
I leave the office, my business concluded, and head out on foot into the falling dusk. It’s November 2022. A good number of Ukrainian numberplates are interspersed with the Bulgarian ones in Varna’s rush-hour traffic. Draped across the façade of the decommissioned Hotel Odessus, just behind the sea garden, is a blue-and-yellow banner that demands peace for Ukraine. The Golden Sands beach resort, a little way up the coast, is providing shelter for thousands of Ukrainian refugees. They have been protesting the government’s decision to rehouse them. All they want, they say, is stability for themselves and their children.
The Armenian capital has absorbed its fair share of foreigners by the time I reach it the following June. The people seeking refuge there are mainly Russians, fleeing conscription or sanctions or simply a war that they don’t condone. Historically, Russians have been welcomed in Yerevan, but the welcome will cool in the months to come as Russia fails to back Armenia in its long-running conflict with Azerbaijan. It’s a different story in the Georgian capital. The Georgian government sees Russia as its natural ally, but the population longs to be closer to Europe, and graffiti covering Tbilisi expresses uniform hostility towards the northern neighbour. Leaving a café one day, I notice the following words printed at the bottom of my bill: ‘Fact check: twenty per cent of Georgian territory is occupied by Russia.’
In July 2023 the mercury is climbing on the southern Russian steppe. At a village market in Rostov Oblast, women wearing headscarves and abayat chat in the shade of stalls piled high with watermelons and cabbages. They are Caucasian immigrants, some of whom hail from the occupied Georgian territories. The village is a short drive from Elista, the capital of the Russian republic of Kalmykia, home to the predominantly Buddhist Kalmyks who came here from Siberia in the seventeenth century (and reprised the journey in the 1950s after Stalin banished them). Russia has also received a huge injection of Ukrainians since the beginning of the war, although Ukraine claims that most of them were taken there against their will. Ukraine has witnessed a mass exodus, of course, as well as internal displacement. On the steppes north of the Black Sea, Bronze Age kurgans – the only blips in the horizontal – are being used for defence.
People are moving around the Black Sea today for the same reasons they did six thousand years ago: trade, war, climate change. The region seems particularly febrile in the third decade of the third millennium CE, but it’s hard to think of a time when it was entirely settled and peaceful. And it’s far from unique in that way. People are on the move somewhere in the world all the time. The proportion of the global population defined as international migrants has remained stable since 1960, at about three per cent.5 Refugees constitute a special category of these. Their numbers are more variable, reflecting short-term crises, but on average they account for a small minority – ten per cent – of that three per cent.
Everywhere you turn today, you hear predictions that a tidal wave of refugees is heading for the world’s more prosperous parts as the climate crisis – induced, this time, by human activities – renders other regions uninhabitable. The predictions sometimes come with warnings attached, that the cultures and languages of the receiving countries are under threat, and with calls to raise the border fences ever higher. The climate crisis is real and its effects are already being felt, but scholars are divided as to the impact these will have on migration. Dutch sociologist Hein de Haas says there will be no tidal wave. The dire predictions are based on a crude totting up of the Earth’s surface area likely to be adversely affected by climate change, and an assumption that the inhabitants of those areas will all head for Europe, North America, Australia or the richer parts of Asia. But de Haas believes that the crisis is more likely to trap the most vulnerable where they are. Some people will travel a long way, and stay where they end up, but because long-distance migration requires considerable resources, most will stray much less far and return home when they can – as they did in Europe in the past, and as they are doing in the Black Sea region today. Others see large pulses of migration as a distinct possibility, not because of climate change itself, but because of its social and economic consequences – loss of land, shortage of water and, eventually, wars over these.
However the crisis unfolds, the world is unlikely to stay the same, linguistically speaking. Only ten years ago, prehistorians thought that the Indo-European languages had surfed a tsunami of migrants to inundate Europe and parts of Asia. Today, the consensus is that those languages came to dominate mainly as a result of the small, temporary movements of people over time – the kind of displacements that de Haas foresees more of as climate change intensifies. Even if we can’t predict the linguistic impact of these in any given place, overall that impact could be profound. We stand today in a familiar linguistic landscape, fretting over the languages we’re losing, but we are not talking about the potentially far greater changes coming down the line.
It’s a difficult subject to discuss. Understandably, a lot of people find it unnerving to think of their languages being transformed by the arrival of new ones, or even dying. But underpinning that fear is a false impression that they have remained static in the past. Throughout humanity’s long existence, languages have never ceased to absorb and change each other. The version of a language that is regarded as standard is often the most changed of all, with respect to a common ancestor. Why? Because it is usually the one spoken in the capital or by an elite, and history tends to be more eventful in places and groups that concentrate power. A very funny illustration of this is the scene in the cult French film Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (Welcome to the Sticks), where two men’s differing pronunciation of the word for ‘dog’ causes mutual bewilderment. The northerner’s kien preserves the hard c of Latin canis, while the standard French-speaker’s chien does not.
Europe has promoted monolingualism ever since it embraced the philosophy of the nation-state in the eighteenth century, and from that time on languages and dialects other than the national ones were repressed. Before that, however, Europe was as multilingual as the rest of the world, and as our species for most of its past. (‘I have three hearts,’ wrote the Roman poet Ennius, who was fluent in Latin, Oscan and Greek.) Often it was those institutions now regarded as models of linguistic propriety that drove change, not least the monarchy. Richard the Lionheart, the great English king who ruled in the twelfth century, probably could not speak English. His mother tongue was Occitan. Elizabeth the First was particularly sensitive to new linguistic usages around her, and regularly ploughed them back into her own speech. She helped English do away with the double negative (‘I did not do nothing’) and replace ‘ye’ with ‘you’.
Some inkling of what’s to come might be the ‘multiethnolects’ that linguists have been observing excitedly for decades now: versions of the national language spoken by young people, mainly the children of immigrants, in multilingual, working-class urban neighbourhoods. Kiezdeutsch in Germany, Straattaal in the Netherlands and Multicultural London English are examples. Multiethnolects exist alongside other spoken forms of the language, including those regional varieties that have survived, and act as conduits for linguistic innovation. Because they are often stigmatised they tend to be short-lived, but a change of circumstances could cause any one of them to stabilise and expand, even – one day – to become the standard form.
The new tools of archaeology and genetics have opened our eyes to our past. Migration has been a constant, ‘indigenous’ is relative. Ten thousand years of human displacement have shrunk the genetic distance between populations to the point where ethnic divisions are losing meaning. The desire to belong is as strong as ever, and as it becomes harder to see the difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’, linguistic and cultural boundaries are being guarded more jealously. Language is becoming a battleground in the identity wars, and preserving our linguistic ‘purity’ a justification used by those who want to raise walls. Unfortunately for them, the most successful language the world ever knew was a hybrid trafficked by migrants. It changed as it went, and when it stopped changing, it died.
The past is a lighthouse, not a port.†
† Russian proverb