Over the course of more than a century of scholarship, it has become increasingly evident that many of the world’s languages are related to each other and may be traced back to a single ancestor language, despite being very different from each other and being spoken in very distant regions — from the far reaches of Northern Europe to India and China, from the shores of the British Isles to those of Anatolia and Persia.
All Indo-European languages are descended from a single prehistoric language, linguistically reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime during the Neolithic or early Bronze Age.
The Indo-European languages comprise all the languages that may be traced back to Proto-Indo-European, a prehistoric ancestor language that was probably spoken by nomadic pastoralist communities in the Eurasian steppe (between present-day Ukraine and Russia) over 5,000 years ago.
The migrations that led the Indo-European languages to branch out from the common ancestor – and to spread throughout Eurasia – have been reconstructed by the specialists with great precision. The last decade has seen great advancements in this research field thanks to the development of an interdisciplinary methodology of reconstruction that integrates linguistics, archaeology, and palaeogenetics.
The reconstruction of the prehistoric context within which the earliest Indo-European languages developed and spread, however, goes far beyond the mere reconstruction of features of grammar and material culture. Comparative analysis and interdisciplinary research allow us to go even further: we can reconstruct multiple aspects of the social structures, the ritual practices, the mythology and the poetic culture of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European.
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family—English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish—have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic; another nine subdivisions are now extinct.
Article Source: Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore.