We get the word from the ancient Greeks, but there is no specific, single group of people who can be identified as Barbarians.

The ancient Greeks divided the peoples of the ancient world into Greeks and non-Greeks. People who were not Greek citizens were called barbaros (βάρβαρος) – foreigners.  Barbaros is an onomatopoeic¹ play on bar bar (βαρ-βαρ). Essentially,  the ancient Greeks thought people speaking foreign languages  sounded like they were saying “Bar bar bar.” In English, we we might say something like, “I don’t understand anything they are saying. It all sounds like, ‘Blah blah blah.’”

The ancient Greeks also considered themselves to be the only properly civilized people in the world. They recognized that other people had civilizations, but those civilizations were either corrupt or fell short of the Greek ideal. A Greek citizen was known as a polites² (πολίτης) – citizen of a city-state – which comes from the root polis meaning city and the modifier ites meaning member of.

The Greeks also used the word xenos (ξένος) for foreigners, but this tended to be used for foreigners living in Greek city states. The term barbaros was reserved for those “uncivilized, unintelligibly babbling” foreigners in foreign lands.

Later, the Romans conquered Greece and appropriated much of its culture. They also took this word, Latinized it to barbarus and expanded the definition of civilized people to include Romans. So all non-Greek and non-Roman people were considered barbarus – uncivilized foreigners.

Today, Barbarian is used to describe someone who is uncivilized or primitive.