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The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 forcibly relocated over a million people in a series of mass expulsions that forged modern Greece and Turkey.
The treaty of Lausanne, like the war that preceded it, was inspired by a new way of looking at human society: one that dealt in hard, hermetically sealed categories, and insisted that every individual and family must belong to one nation or the other, and live within its borders. [1]
How did English get to be this way? Was there a moment, or was it a process?
What languages were spoken on this land before English? What happened to them — and when we say they “disappeared,” what do we actually mean?
If you go back far enough in Europe, the linguistic map is unrecognizably diverse. What had to happen to consolidate that into the neat blocks of “French,” “German,” and “Spanish” that we see on a modern map?