The Shift Engine

Anatolia has changed hands and tongues more times than almost anywhere else on Earth. Hittite gave way to Phrygian and Greek, Greek to Persian administration without ever losing the street, Byzantine Greek gave way to Seljuk and then Ottoman Turkish — and at every turn, the language spoken by the empire and the language spoken at the dinner table drifted apart before eventually, sometimes, converging.

The Shift Engine is an interactive simulation spanning roughly 3,000 years — from the height of the Hittite Empire in 1250 BCE to the late Ottoman period — that lets you scrub through history and watch superstrate (the ruling administrative language) and substrate (what people actually spoke at home) pull apart and merge across ten regions, from Thrace to Arabia. Along the way it surfaces the individual stories — a bilingual household, a palace translator, a Damascus scribe — that are usually flattened out of the big historical narrative.