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The original was posted on /r/askhistorians by /u/holomorphic_chipotle on 2023-09-07 23:24:33+00:00.

Popular history is full of maps showing the different “peoples” of the world and their distribution around the globe. Though this is even more common in the racist corners of the internet, I am surprised how even among historians language is so often seen as a stand-in for ethnicity, e.g. the speakers of Mande languages are the Mandé people, instead of simply referring to Mandé-speakers. More than half of the world’s population is bilingual and learning a foreign language is not impossible, so how come we ended up asuming that having a common language implies a common origin? I mean, was there ever a polity that included the ancestors of Southern Germans, Northern Germans, and Scandinavians?