William Collins snares ‘enlightening and ambitious’ history of language by Spinney

William Collins has snared “an enlightening and ambitious” new history of language by Laura Spinney.  

Shoaib Rokadiya, editorial director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to Mother Tongue from Will Francis at Janklow & Nesbit. It will publish in 2024. 

The synopsis says: “Proto Indo-European is the ancestor language which gave rise to English, Latin, Russian, Greek and Sanskrit. The languages that descended from it are spoken by half of the world’s population. It gave us the Vedas, the Norse sagas, Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. But where did it come from? Who were its first speakers, and what was their culture? What do its most deeply buried words and structures tell us about the civilisation that invented it? 

“In Mother Tongue, Laura Spinney sets out to answer these questions. She will show how, for the first time, the three disciplines of archaeology, genetics and linguistics make it possible to build a narrative about the speakers of this Ur-language and their movements over time. It is a story of cultures coming together – nomads from the steppe to the north and east of the Black Sea, and farmers from the temperate zone to the south and west. Over time, they forged a common language and their shared cultural influence spread across the vast Eurasian landmass. How and when this occurred, however, are matters of deep mystery and controversy and have since fuelled nationalist myths, from the Nazi ideal of Aryan purity to Hindu supremacism. Those myths have sometimes clashed, as in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine over cultural and linguistic primacy.” 

Rokadiya said: “I’ve long admired Laura Spinney’s writing but I was blown away by the sheer originality of her proposal for this book, which effortlessly manages to connect deep human history to the complex geopolitics of our present world – and all through the prism of language. Mother Tongue will be a spellbinding book.” 

Spinney added: “The time is ripe to tell this story and I’m thrilled to be working with Shoaib – who himself speaks a clutch of Indo-European languages – in bringing it to the page.”