Belonging

Belong.

You can belong to a group if you fit in, but something belongs to you if you own it. This word tells us a story about the way we humans think about the things we own—and our place in the world.

Go back to Old English and you’ll find the root word belang, which meant to fit in, or to pertain to, or to be connected to in some way. Further back still and you find *langaz in Proto-Germanic, which pertained to length—how long something is. Long, length, and along all come from this same Proto-Germanic root.

Moving along, how be + lang got combined is pretty easy to grasp. If you were in a state of lang, you were along the line of the same thing. You lined up, if you will. This could be physical or metaphorical, like two parallel fences that clearly belonged together, or it could be those nasty Anglo-Saxon invaders who belonged somewhere else.

Belonging to a group, then, is a very old linguistic idea. We’ve been using the word this way since long before English was the language we know today.

Something belonging to me is much newer, by contrast. This didn’t happen overnight, but instead over centuries as property ownership became legally enshrined. Feudalism saw the creation of documents that mentioned belonging in the sense of ownership.

Still, something belonged to you, but you belonged to the king—not in the sense that the king owned you, but in the sense that you owed the king. That sense of belonging eventually faded away, while the personal ownership angle stuck around to Modern English.

Laws written to protect personal property went hand in hand with this evolution. People in England would only take so much from their rulers. Over time, this use case became dominant, while belonging to a land (or nation) became less so.

The culture and legal systems ultimately shaped the language, and with the central motivating factor of capitalism being upward mobility, which meant more things belonged to you.