Book review

Review of The People That Never Were: Linguistic Scholarship and the Invention of the Aryans. By Christopher M. Hutton.

Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2025. ISBN 9780190213015 (e-book (open access)) / 9780190212988 (Print book) £ 64.00

Professor Hutton’s new book is a long-awaited continuation of his work on the linguistic and racial foundations of the ideology of Aryanism, appropriated and made infamous by the Nazis. In his first book on the subject, Linguistics and the Third Reich (1999), Hutton developed a controversial argument about linguistic knowledge: “There is the erroneous statement that Aryan was abused as a pseudo-racial term by linguists in Nazi Germany. In fact, it was linguistics that had set this whole train of thought in motion, not in Nazi Germany, but in the very founding of the science of language in the early nineteenth century” (1999: 281). The new book goes deeper into the past to find the roots of the philological/linguistic obsession over a supposed Aryan people or race. It is an ambitious study of 18th, 19th and 20th century discussions about “Aryans”, fit into about 235 pages of dense text. It does not disappoint.