Spreading the words

The world's most popular family of languages has its roots in a small corner of Europe. Its evolution - a story of migration, conquest, intermarriage and human progress - has lessons for how we see ourselves.

- MARK BROATCH

We take it for granted that we have nationalities, national languages and countries with borders, and that these are, to a large degree, fixed. Yet nation states are only considered to be a couple of hundred years old. Before that, we dwelled in multinational, often multiethnic and multilingual states and federations.

And languages don't respect borders, leaking into other countries, either wholesale or, through dialects, by degrees.

But in recent years, thanks to developments in genetic analysis, archaeology and linguistic analysis, new theories have emerged that suggest our ideas about many of our ancestors - who spoke the languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau and northern India languages now spoken by more than three billion people) and the kinds of people they were are misguided at best. These emerging theories throw into shade rigid ideas of race and identity.

In her new book Proto: How One Ancient World Went Global, science journalist Laura Spinney writes: "You can have a national identity; you can consider that your culture, you can even consider your linguistic identity if you speak a national language.