Sajan
How did the Indo-European languages spread across Eurasia, and how will language continue to evolve in the modern day?
Did you know that a few thousand Bronze Age herders from the Eurasian steppe helped shape most of the languages spoken from Ireland to India today? This project asks how Indo-European languages--from English, Spanish, and Russian to Hindi and Persian--spread from a single reconstructed ancestor, Proto-Indo-European, across such a vast area, and what their story can tell us about how language will keep changing in the modern world. Drawing on historical linguistics, computational models, archaeology, and ancient DNA, I argue that Indo‑European did not explode outward in one clean “tree” of daughter languages. Instead, steppe‑adjacent migrations during the Bronze Age set the stage, and then languages diversified through long periods of regional contact and hybridisation. Case studies such as the early split of Anatolian, the eastward movement of Tocharian, the southward expansion of Indo-Iranian, and the Corded Ware horizon in Europe show that migration looked different in each region, shaped by ecology, technology (especially horses and wheeled vehicles), and social structures like elite dominance and intermarriage. At the same time, debates over subgroupings such as Italo‑Celtic and the formation of western branches reveal that many Indo‑European languages evolved in dialect continua rather than neat, isolated branches. Finally, I connect this deep history to present‑day sociolinguistic research on English and other world languages, which shows that mobility, prestige, dense social networks, and the high-frequency “core” words we use every day still govern how languages change. Indo-European’s past suggests that our languages will not merge into one global uniform speech, but will continue to diverge and recombine as people move, interact, and reshape their linguistic worlds.
WATCH HERE
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Did you know that a few thousand Bronze Age herders from the Eurasian steppe helped shape most of the languages spoken from Ireland to India today? This project asks how Indo-European languages--from English, Spanish, and Russian to Hindi and Persian--spread from a single reconstructed ancestor, Proto-Indo-European, across such a vast area, and what their story can tell us about how language will keep changing in the modern world. Drawing on historical linguistics, computational models, archaeology, and ancient DNA, I argue that Indo‑European did not explode outward in one clean “tree” of daughter languages. Instead, steppe‑adjacent migrations during the Bronze Age set the stage, and then languages diversified through long periods of regional contact and hybridisation. Case studies such as the early split of Anatolian, the eastward movement of Tocharian, the southward expansion of Indo-Iranian, and the Corded Ware horizon in Europe show that migration looked different in each region, shaped by ecology, technology (especially horses and wheeled vehicles), and social structures like elite dominance and intermarriage. At the same time, debates over subgroupings such as Italo‑Celtic and the formation of western branches reveal that many Indo‑European languages evolved in dialect continua rather than neat, isolated branches. Finally, I connect this deep history to present‑day sociolinguistic research on English and other world languages, which shows that mobility, prestige, dense social networks, and the high-frequency “core” words we use every day still govern how languages change. Indo-European’s past suggests that our languages will not merge into one global uniform speech, but will continue to diverge and recombine as people move, interact, and reshape their linguistic worlds.
WATCH HERE
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