A review of the book 'Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global' written by Laura Spinney.
One ancient language transformed our world. This is its story.
At the end of the last ice age, a language was born between Europe and Asia. This tongue, which we call Proto-Indo-European, exploded outwards until its offspring were spoken from Scotland to China. Today Indo-European languages are spoken by nearly half of humanity. How did this happen?
Laura Spinney set out to answer that question, retracing an odyssey across continents and millennia.
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Coming up: A review of the book 'Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global' written by Laura Spinney.
Namaste Friends. My name is 'Shinil Subramanian Payamal' and you are listening to the Historylogy podcast.
Before I proceed, a full disclosure: This book was bought with my own money and not been provided to me by the author or publisher.
Little bit about the author:
Laura Spinney is a science writer. She is the author of the international bestseller 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.
Let me read a brief description of the book:
QUOTE
One ancient language transformed our world. This is its story.
At the end of the last ice age, a language was born between Europe and Asia. This tongue, which we call Proto-Indo-European, exploded outwards until its offspring were spoken from Scotland to China. Today Indo-European languages are spoken by nearly half of humanity. How did this happen?
Laura Spinney set out to answer that question, retracing an odyssey across continents and millennia. Along the steppe and the Silk Roads, we follow the ancient peoples who spread their languages far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the scientists on a thrilling mission to discover this distant diaspora. What they have learned has vital implications for our modern world, as people and their languages are on the move again. Proto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words.
UNQUOTE
As you must have figured out from the description above, the book’s premise is audacious yet grounded: it traces the improbable global dominance of a single ancient tongue—Proto-Indo-European (henceforth PIE), the reconstructed ancestor of over 400 modern languages, from English to Hindi, spoken by nearly half the world’s population.
Spinney combines stories about migrations, trade, mythologies, and the puzzles of lost words — she gives us not only technical detail about how linguists reconstruct Proto-Indo-European, but also the human, archaeological, and genetic contexts that shaped its diffusion. For readers interested in how science works across disciplines, this gives a sense not just of what is known, but how it is known.
Though much of the subject is academic, Spinney keeps the narrative alive — vivid descriptions of landscapes, migrations, the impact of technologies (wheel, metallurgy), interactions between ancient peoples.
And the book benefits from being very current: Spinney includes very recent genetic studies, recent archaeological work, so readers get something close to the cutting edge.
The book also mentions an oft repeated lie i.e. Ashoka converted to Buddhism AFTER the Kalinga war. But as it has been proven again and again, Ashoka had converted to Buddhism well before the Kalinga war.
The book also lightly mentions a theory about migrants not bringing Sanskrit to India because Sanskrit was born in India, being the language of the Indus Valley Civilisation. This theory, dubbed ‘Out-of-India’, reverses the arrow of Indo-European dispersal and places the original homeland of the entire family in north-west India.
Final Verdict:
Overall, Proto is a strong and worthwhile book. It is not a linguistics textbook; it’s a cultural biography of a ghost language. It strikes a good balance between being informative, up‑to‑date, and engaging. It does what a good popular science / history book should: it opens up a complex field, gives us readers plenty to think about, and shows that our understanding of PIE is still evolving.
In an era of AI translation and globalese, understanding how one ancient tongue went viral is more than academic. It’s a mirror.
The book is around 275 pages, excluding over 20 pages of Bibliography and a similar number of pages for the Endnotes.
I give this book 4/5.
The book is available in Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle and Audible formats. I have given the respective buy links in the show notes. Please check them out for the latest prices.
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