5000 years ago the language sounded completely different. Back then there was no Swedish, Arabic or Italian as we know them today, but the modern languages, just like everything else, are something that developed over time. Jenny Larsson, who leads a research project together with a group of European researchers, is trying to piece together the puzzle of how ancient people spoke.
– The goal of this research is to try to find out more about human prehistory – and above all about human language.
Swedish, together with the other Nordic languages, belongs to the Indo-European language family – which goes back to a single original language. Most likely, people started speaking Indo-European somewhere in southern Russia or eastern Ukraine, says Jenny.
– You get so much information from language. What I do is I read ancient texts, runes and inscriptions and have learned a lot of ancient languages such as Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. So I sit with old, old texts and look for clues that will take me further, says Jenny.
The linguist also lets us hear what it might have sounded like, as she reads a passage from an ancient fable in Indo-European.
Listen – in the clip above