Linguists of the Word, Unite!

TL;DR

• The Soviet Union nurtured a generation of linguists who pursued long-range comparative linguistics, attempting to link diverse language families into giant “macro-families.”
• Marxist ideology and institutional dynamics helped shape this trend: early Soviet theories treated language as a class phenomenon, and later scholars embraced sweeping historical perspectives on language evolution.
• Soviet comparativists proposed bold hypotheses like the Nostratic superfamily, uniting Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Afro-Asiatic, and other languages under one deep ancestral tongue.
• In the West, most linguists remained skeptical of such “proto-world” quests, but a few (e.g. Morris Swadesh and Joseph Greenberg) shared similar ambitions – often at odds with mainstream academia and sometimes driven by their leftist politics.
• The legacy of these “proletarian polyglots” endures: while controversial, their grand theories spurred new methods, massive databases, and interdisciplinary dialogue linking linguistics with genetics and archaeology in the search for humanity’s common mother tongue.

From Marx to Marr: A Linguistic Revolution#

Bruegel’s depiction of the Tower of Babel (1563) symbolizes the confusion of tongues that Soviet linguists later attempted to resolve by positing a common origin for diverse languages. Many Soviet scholars dreamed of conceptually reversing Babel, seeking the unity behind global linguistic diversity.

In the early Soviet era, linguistics became entangled with Marxist ideology. Nikolai Marr, a Georgian-born linguist, declared that language was directly shaped by class and economic base. He argued all languages shared a single prehistoric origin made of just a few primordial syllables¹. Marr’s “Japhetic” theory – positing that new languages would emerge under socialism – was eagerly embraced as Marxist orthodoxy in the 1920s. The Soviet state, keen to craft a proletarian science free from “bourgeois” influence, made Marr’s doctrine the official approach to language for decades. Under this doctrine, traditional comparative linguistics (with its focus on family trees like Indo-European) was dismissed as reactionary. Instead, language was viewed as a class-bound cultural construct, expected to evolve towards a unified proletarian speech in a classless society.

This radical linguistic experiment did not last forever. By 1950, Soviet leaders themselves grew skeptical of Marr’s pseudoscientific claims. In an unusual twist, Joseph Stalin personally intervened in the linguistic debate. He published a famous article in 1950 rejecting Marr’s ideas and affirming that language is not a class-specific tool but a common heritage of the whole people. Stalin’s essay, “Marxism and Problems of Linguistics,” effectively denounced Marrism and ended the era of proletarian linguistics zealotry. This U-turn reopened the door for historical-comparative linguistics in the USSR. Ironically, after years of enforced linguistic egalitarianism, Soviet scholars were now free to explore language evolution with more scientific rigor – and they soon took that freedom in some ambitious directions.

A Diverse Empire of Tongues#

Several factors in the Soviet Union’s intellectual landscape primed its linguists to become long-range comparativists once classical scholarship was rehabilitated. For one, the USSR spanned a vast territory brimming with linguistic diversity – Slavic, Finno-Ugric, Turkic, Caucasian, Tungusic, and more languages coexisted within its borders. Soviet linguists had a living laboratory of languages to compare, many of them understudied in the West. Marr’s era, despite its flaws, had at least sparked interest in documenting non-Indo-European tongues of the USSR’s many nationalities. When the comparative method returned to respectability, Soviet scholars were armed with massive amounts of data on these languages.

Moreover, Marxist intellectual culture emphasized big-picture historical processes. Soviet academia favored sweeping, diachronic studies in fields like archaeology and anthropology – a natural extension was to examine language evolution on a grand timescale. The notion that all human languages might spring from a common source aligned with an egalitarian, anti-racist outlook. (Notably, 19th-century European linguists had often resisted linking Indo-European with “lesser” languages out of ethnocentrism; one scholar remarked on prejudice against affiliating Indo-European with the tongues of “yellow races”.) By contrast, Soviet internationalism encouraged viewing all languages as part of a shared human story. Proving deep kinship between, say, Russian and Nahuatl, or Turkish and Tamil, had a certain utopian allure – a linguistic echo of Communist slogans about the unity of all peoples.

Finally, the somewhat insular environment of Soviet science played a role. Cut off from some Western academic trends, Soviet linguists were less swayed by the rise of structuralism and formal linguistics (like Chomsky’s theories) that dominated mid-20th-century Western linguistics. Instead, they maintained a strong tradition in historical linguistics and philology. With state support for fundamental research (and no need to chase rapid publication for tenure), teams of scholars could devote years to compiling comparative dictionaries and pondering long-range connections. In this milieu, pursuing a grand unifying linguistic hypothesis was not frowned upon – it was encouraged, or at least tolerated, as a prestigious intellectual endeavor. The stage was set for Soviet linguists to aim for the linguistic equivalent of the “Theory of Everything.”

The Nostratic Quest: “Our Language” Unites Eurasia#

Once freed from Marr’s shadow, Soviet historical linguists wasted little time in launching bold comparative projects. By the 1960s, a small group of scholars in Moscow began fleshing out the idea of a macro-family that would tie together many of the Old World’s language groups. They called this hypothetical mother tongue Nostratic, from the Latin nostras meaning “our compatriot” (essentially, “our language” in a broad inclusive sense). The term Nostratic had been coined earlier by Danish linguist Holger Pedersen (1903), but it was the Soviets – notably Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky – who turned it into a detailed hypothesis in the ’60s.

Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolsky were true pioneers of long-range comparison. Working largely behind the Iron Curtain, they painstakingly compared basic vocabulary and grammatical affixes across disparate families: Indo-European, Uralic (e.g. Finnish, Hungarian), Altaic (Turkic, Mongolic, etc.), Kartvelian (Georgian and relatives), Dravidian (South India), and Afro-Asiatic (Semitic, Berber, etc.). By identifying recurrent sound correspondences and shared roots, they reconstructed around a 1,000-word proto-language dating back ~15,000 years. This proto-Nostratic lexicon included words for body parts, natural features, pronouns, and other core terms that hinted at a common origin of those Eurasian and North African lineages.

The Nostratic hypothesis, as developed by the Moscow team, proposed that a single prehistoric language community had eventually diverged into many of the families we know today. For example, if Nostratic were real, then languages as apparently unrelated as Russian, Arabic, Turkish, and Tamil are extremely distant cousins. Such claims were bound to be controversial – but the Nostraticists buttressed them with a formidable body of evidence. Illich-Svitych even published a multi-volume comparative dictionary of Nostratic, showing proposed cognates (related words) across the six major families in the superfamily. For instance, he identified a root for “water” that seemed to surface in Latin unda, Russian voda, Turkish su (from earlier *sū/*śu?), and others, after applying sound changes. Skeptics could (and did) argue that these resemblances were cherry-picked or coincidental. But to the Nostratic researchers, the sheer volume of cross-family matches – combined with systematic sound change patterns – indicated a genuine genetic relationship.

It’s worth noting that the “Moscow school” of comparative linguistics prided itself on methodological rigor. Unlike some Western proponents of linguistic mega-families, the Soviet Nostraticists strove to follow the traditional Neogrammarian comparative method: establish regular sound correspondences and reconstruct proto-forms, just on a bigger canvas. In effect, they saw long-range comparison as an extension of normal historical linguistics, not a different game with looser rules. This set them apart from, say, American linguist Joseph Greenberg, who in the same era was classifying languages by a faster (and critics said flimsier) technique of mass vocabulary comparison. The Russians believed Nostratic could be demonstrated with scientific rigor – and by doing so, they would place Soviet linguistics on the world map.

By the 1980s, Nostratic research had gained a dedicated following in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Conferences were held to debate which families belonged in Nostratic and to refine the proto-language reconstruction. The Institute of Linguistics in Moscow became a hub for this work, and younger linguists like Vladimir Dybo and Sergei Starostin joined the fray. Indeed, Nostratic became the cornerstone of Soviet long-range linguistics, inspiring offshoot theories and a general enthusiasm that the ultimate “mother tongue” might eventually be found. As one Western observer noted at the time, a cadre of “mostly Soviet and East European researchers” were driven by the belief that all human languages evolved from a single ancient source. Proving this monogenesis of language was nothing less than a scientific Holy Grail.

Beyond Nostratic: Macro-Families Proliferate#

Flush with the perceived success of Nostratic, Soviet comparativists didn’t stop at Eurasia. Some turned their attention to other continents and even grander time depths. Sergei Starostin, a brilliant polymath of languages, emerged as a leading figure in the 1980s–90s. Starostin had a hand in exploring several bold hypotheses: he revisited the disputed Altaic grouping (which would unite Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japanese) and lent support to it with new evidence. He also teamed up with Western colleagues on Dené–Caucasian, a hypothesized family linking the Sino-Tibetan languages (like Chinese) with the languages of the Caucasus Mountains (and even the Na-Dené languages of North America) into one huge cluster. If Dené–Caucasian were valid, it would mean, for example, that Basque, Burmese, Chechen, and Navajo all share a remote common ancestor. Starostin and collaborators proposed sound correspondences and proto-words for this theory as well, though it remained even more controversial than Nostratic.

The momentum of Soviet long-range linguistics even carried over past the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Russian scholars continued their macro-comparative projects with renewed international collaboration. Databases like the online “Tower of Babel” (named with a wink to the biblical tale) were created under Starostin’s guidance to compile word lists from hundreds of languages for computer-assisted comparison. The Global Lexicostatistical Database, another project, sought to quantify lexical similarities on a worldwide scale. By the late 1990s, conferences on “Proto-World” or “Mother Tongue” attracted both former Soviet and a few Western linguists who were willing to brave the skepticism of colleagues.

Western mainstream linguists, for the most part, remained highly skeptical of these sweeping linguistic time-travel expeditions. While Indo-European and similar families had well-established methodologies and evidence, proposals like Nostratic or Amerind (Greenberg’s grouping of nearly all Native American languages) were often viewed as fringe science. Many specialists pointed out the high noise-to-signal ratio when comparing languages over tens of millennia: chance resemblances and borrowings could easily mislead analyses. A prominent linguist, Lyle Campbell, famously suggested that Greenberg’s broad classifications should be “shouted down” rather than accepted, reflecting the intense backlash in the field. Historical linguistics traditionally taught that beyond roughly 6,000–8,000 years of separation, languages diverge so much that regular relationships become undetectable – a rule of thumb exemplified by linguist Johanna Nichols’ estimate that grammatical evidence “dissipates entirely after about 8,000 years”. Long-range comparativists were seen by many as ignoring this caution, venturing into deep time with insufficient tools.

Yet, crucially, the Soviet long-rangers had an institutional camaraderie and persistence that lone Western “lumpers” lacked. In the USSR, they formed a semi-official school of thought; their ideas were taught (albeit alongside more conservative linguistics) and published in academic presses. Outside the USSR, comparativists who advocated macro-families often found themselves isolated or ridiculed. For example, Morris Swadesh, an American pioneer of distant comparison and lexicostatistics, was marginalized in part due to politics – he was fired in 1949 during the Red Scare for his Communist ties – and also because his monogenesis ideas were far outside mainstream linguistics. Swadesh ended up pursuing his research in Mexico and elsewhere, compiling evidence that he believed pointed to a single origin of all languages. Joseph Greenberg, another American, had a distinguished career (especially for classifying African languages), but when he ventured to lump all Amerindian languages into one family in the 1980s, he too faced fierce criticism from specialists in those languages.

It’s no coincidence that some of these non-Soviet comparativists had left-leaning or anti-establishment streaks. They found resonance – or at least scholarly friendship – with the Soviet school. In the late 1980s, Vitaly Shevoroshkin, a Russian émigré linguist at the University of Michigan, organized meetings where East and West “macro-comparativists” could share ideas. Shevoroshkin noted that only a handful of American linguists were interested in probing beyond the conventional time depth, whereas the Soviet scholars had already reconstructed languages from the Last Glacial Period (15,000+ years ago). This East-West collaboration gave birth to publications and a short-lived journal (Mother Tongue) in the 1990s, aimed at exploring a potential Proto-World language – essentially taking Nostratic and other macro-families one step further to an ultimate ancestor language.

While Proto-World remains speculative (and many linguists doubt it can ever be demonstrated), the efforts of the Soviet comparativists and their allies were not in vain. They vastly expanded our data on little-known languages, spurred the creation of big comparative databases, and even pushed linguistics to interface with genetics and paleontology. Today, human geneticists constructing family trees of populations sometimes find intriguing parallels in the trees of languages – and they owe some of that insight to the bold hypotheses that languages, like genes, form a tree tracing back to a common root. In a sense, the Soviet long-range linguists forced the question: how far back can we trace our spoken words? Even if mainstream science hasn’t fully embraced their answers, the question itself continues to inspire research.

Why Did the USSR Breed Long-Range Comparativists?#

Looking back, it’s clear that the Soviet Union offered a perfect storm of conditions to cultivate these linguistic visionaries. Ideologically, the notion of unity underlying diversity meshed well with Marxist-Leninist themes. Soviet rhetoric often celebrated the friendship of peoples and a common destiny; finding a primal linguistic unity was a romantic scholarly parallel. Early on, Marxist influence literally reshaped linguistics via Marr, and even after Marr’s fall, the Marxist historical framework – with its grand narratives of evolution – gave intellectual cover for pursuing deep history in linguistics. Scholars could frame their research as uncovering stages in the “evolution of language”, analogous to stages of socio-economic development. Indeed, Vitaly Shevoroshkin argued that language evolution could illuminate early human migrations and societal changes, which is a very Marxist-flavored interdisciplinary approach (tying language to material history).

Institutionally, Soviet academia provided support for extensive, long-term projects. Linguists in Moscow or Leningrad working on Nostratic had access to numerous colleagues and state funding to publish hefty comparative tomes. There was also a sense of patriotic competition with the West: just as the USSR strove for firsts in space, it didn’t mind claiming primacy in solving the puzzle of language origins. Having Western linguists dismiss the idea only spurred the Soviets to double down and prove them wrong. In the Cold War context, being an intellectual “renegade” was easier within the relatively closed Soviet scholarly world, where a small circle of like-minded linguists could support each other’s heterodox projects without as much outside interference. One Russian researcher wryly noted that Western linguists could ignore macro-comparativism, but in Russia “the adjoining disciplines” like archaeology kept raising big questions – and linguists felt pressure to offer big answers.

Another factor was personal and political alignment. Several of the key figures were either Soviet citizens or sympathizers of leftist politics. This isn’t mere coincidence. Swadesh’s case illustrates how a brilliant comparativist with communist leanings found himself unwelcome in 1950s America – yet his ideas found a home in Soviet and socialist circles. In Soviet-bloc publications, one can find Swadesh’s lexicostatistical methods and long-range link proposals being taken quite seriously at a time when U.S. journals shunned them. It’s as if a parallel track of linguistic research developed: cautious, specialization-focused mainstream linguistics in the West versus adventurous, synthesis-seeking linguistics in the East. To be fair, not all Soviet linguists bought into Nostratic or macro-family theories; plenty remained skeptical. But the proportion of enthusiasts was far higher than elsewhere. As one Science journalist put it in 1988, “the debate over the Mother Tongue” had Soviet scholars firmly on the believing side, while most Western experts doubted such a tongue would ever be found.

Lastly, the zeitgeist of the mid-20th century must be acknowledged. This was the era of grand unifying theories – in physics (searching for a unified field theory), in biology (DNA as the key to life’s unity), in anthropology (the “out of Africa” theory of human origins). It’s no stretch to see Soviet linguists as part of that zeitgeist, aiming for a grand unifying theory of language. The difference was that in the West, linguistics turned inward (toward structural rules and the human mind’s grammar), whereas in the USSR it turned outward and backward (toward historical connections and the origins of speech). Sociopolitical incentives nudged it that way: a Soviet scholar wasn’t as free to engage in abstract psychological theorizing (Chomskyan linguistics was sometimes viewed with suspicion as “idealism”), but tracing peoples’ ancient connections fit fine with Marxist materialism and Soviet historiography. By following the comparative-historical path, Soviet linguists could produce work that was scientific, material, and revolutionary (at least in their own eyes).

In sum, the Soviet Union produced so many long-range comparativists because it had the right mix of ideology, resources, and intellectual daring. The language of the proletariat – in the broadest sense, the idea that all the world’s proletarians (and everyone else) might once have spoken the same tongue – was an enticing concept that Soviet linguists could pursue with a straight face. They operated with a kind of scholarly audacity, at times skirting the edges of evidence but undeniably expanding the horizons of linguistic inquiry. Their legacy is a reminder that science, even linguistics, doesn’t happen in a political vacuum. In a land of five-year plans and futurist dreams, it somehow made sense to fund a retro-projection 15,000 years into the past, reconstructing “our language” – and perhaps, ultimately, our unity as humans.

FAQ#

Q1: What was Nostratic, and why did Soviet linguists care about it? A: Nostratic is a proposed “macro-family” of languages uniting many Eurasian and African language families into one ancient lineage. Soviet linguists in the 1960s–1980s championed it as evidence of a common origin for diverse tongues, aligning with their historical focus and offering a prestigious, unifying discovery for Soviet science. In short, Nostratic promised to show that languages like Russian, Arabic, and Hindi all descend from one mother tongue – a bold idea the Soviets found both scientifically intriguing and ideologically attractive.

Q2: How did communist politics influence these linguistic theories? A: Communist ideology indirectly encouraged big-picture, unifying theories in linguistics. Early Soviet rule imposed Marr’s Marxist linguistic theory (later abandoned), and generally the regime favored historical-evolutionary approaches. The notion that all humans (regardless of class or race) share a linguistic heritage resonated with Marxist egalitarian ideals. Additionally, some Western linguists with communist leanings (like Morris Swadesh) pursued monolithic language origin theories and found more acceptance for these ideas in the USSR, where challenging the Western academic status quo was almost a sport.

Q3: Why are mainstream linguists skeptical about long-range comparisons? A: Most linguists argue that languages change so much over time that after maybe 6,000–8,000 years, it’s extremely difficult to prove any genetic relationship – the signal gets drowned in noise. Long-range comparativists often must rely on fuzzy resemblances between words or grammatical bits, which could arise from chance or borrowing. Mainstream scholars demand systematic sound-correspondence proof (as in established families like Indo-European), which macro-family theories haven’t conclusively provided. In short, the evidence for proposals like Nostratic or a global Proto-World is seen as speculative and not rigorous enough by conventional standards.

Q4: Did any Western linguists support the idea of a common mother tongue? A: Yes, a small number did. In the U.S., Joseph Greenberg classified world languages into broad groups (e.g. he claimed all Native American languages, except a couple of families, belong to one “Amerind” family), and Merritt Ruhlen advocated for a global Proto-World language. Earlier, Morris Swadesh also believed in ultimate monogenesis and developed lexicostatistics to investigate it. However, these scholars often worked on the fringes of the field – Greenberg’s and Ruhlen’s ideas were controversial and met with strong opposition from specialists. Notably, Greenberg’s sweeping classifications were largely rejected by contemporaries, and Swadesh’s political troubles pushed him outside the mainstream. Their efforts paralleled the Soviet comparativists’, but without the same institutional backing.

Q5: What is the status of Soviet long-range linguistic hypotheses today? A: They remain contentious but have evolved. Nostratic and similar macro-family hypotheses are still considered unproven by most linguists, though a “Moscow school” of comparative linguistics continues its research (now globally, often in collaboration with non-Russian colleagues). Some specific proposals have gained limited support – for example, the Dené–Yeniseian hypothesis linking a Siberian language (Yeniseian) with a North American family (Na-Dené) has been taken seriously by many experts. Overall, Soviet-born theories injected ambition into linguistics, and while the grand vision of a single mother tongue remains unconfirmed, the data and methods gathered have enriched our understanding of language relationships. The conversation between lumpers and splitters – those seeking deep connections and those hewing to stricter evidence – continues, informed in part by the Soviet comparativists’ bold contributions.

Footnotes#

Sources#

1. Encyclopædia Britannica. “Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., last updated 2014. Describes Marr’s linguistic theories and their Marxist interpretation, noting the Soviet endorsement and Stalin’s 1950 denunciation.
2. United Press International. “Linguists Delve Many Millennia Into Past to Find Man’s Mother Tongue.” Los Angeles Times, January 1, 1989. Report on Soviet and East European linguists (like Shevoroshkin, Illich-Svitych, Dolgopolsky) attempting to reconstruct an ancient “Mother Tongue,” explaining the Nostratic hypothesis and the monogenesis concept.
3. Karttunen, Klaus. “Swadesh, Morris.” Who Was Who in Indology (Biographical Database), 2024. Biography of Morris Swadesh, confirming his firing in 1949 as a Communist and noting his work on lexicostatistics and monogenesis (The Origin and Diversification of Language).
4. Starostin, George. “Macro-Comparative Linguistics in the 21st Century: State of the Art and Perspectives.” Journal of Language Relationship 11 (2014): 5–32. Outlines two schools of long-range comparison (Greenberg’s mass comparison vs. the Moscow school led by Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolsky) and discusses the increasing interest from genetics and archaeology in macro-family research.
5. Greenberg, Joseph H. Language in the Americas. Stanford University Press, 1987. Provides Greenberg’s classification of Native American languages into three macro-families (Eskimo–Aleut, Na-Dené, and Amerind) – a highly controversial work exemplifying Western long-range comparison and the debates it spurred.
6. Ruhlen, Merritt. The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue. John Wiley & Sons, 1994. A synthesis aimed at general audiences, where Ruhlen (a follower of Greenberg) argues for the monogenesis of human language and summarizes evidence for several macro-families, citing work of both Western and Soviet long-range linguists.