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Historical linguistics demonstrates that it is possible to classify languages ‘genetically’ by grouping them into ‘families’ sharing a common historical source or ‘protolanguage’. Thus, the common ancestor of the Romance languages (e.g. French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian) is Latin (more precisely, the popular Latin of the Roman Empire, not quite identical with Classical Latin). Likewise, the Indic languages (e.g. Hindi and Bengali) derive from a common ancestor very similar to Classical Sanskrit. More usually, however, the ancestral language of a family is not directly attested – for example, because it was used in a pre-literate culture and had no written form. Even in such cases there are methods by which we can attempt its partial reconstruction and make reasonable hypotheses about its sound system, grammatical structure, and vocabulary – mainly by comparing the systems of the surviving family members and sieving out accidental or trivial similarities. The craft of deciding which similarities are relevant to the reconstruction is called the comparative method.
It is possible that all the languages of the world are ultimately related, that is go back to a single common ancestor. If so, that universal protolanguage must have been in use at least 100000 years ago, since after that date the geographical dispersal of modern Homo sapiens would inevitably have led to linguistic differentiation. The common origin of human languages may be likely, but beware of linguists who claim they have demonstrated it! All the ‘proofs’ I’m aware of are based on highly questionable procedures. What we can say much more securely is that the world’s languages can be grouped into about 70 large families with a residue of ‘isolated’ languages, for which there is no evidence of genetic affiliation with any particular family.
There are many myths and false ideas about the notion of ‘(Proto-)Indo-European’. First, the name is completely arbitrary and refers to the modern distribution of the offspring of PIE, not to its own geographical location. In particular, PIE should not be connected with India, Europe or any other place just on account of its name. Secondly, ‘Indo-European’ is a linguistic description and cannot be used to refer to anybody’s ‘race’ or anthropological type. Today IE languages are spoken by people of all imaginable genetic backgrounds, and it’s more than likely that from the very start the Indo-European speech community was a mixture of human types. The idea that all the original Indo-Europeans were tall, dolichocephalic, blue-eyed and flaxen-haired is as absurd as claiming that they were all left-handed and dark-skinned. Thirdly, there was in all likelihood no single, uniform, ‘standard’ PIE (as some learned reconstructions would make you believe), but rather a continuum or related dialects used for several centuries by a loose community of speakers living over quite a large area. All the dialects changed with the passage of time, which is what languages inevitably do. There was no central power, no tendency to standardise the language, and we can hardly be certain that there were any really pan-IE traditions or religious systems (except, perhaps, the worship of certain gods, especially those representing the forces of nature, and in particular the Sky God). Then (as usually claimed) migrations took the speakers of PIE dialects in various directions, fragmenting the community and producing several sub-stocks known as branches (e.g. Indo-Iranian, Germanic, Slavic, Celtic,...), each with its own reconstructible protolanguage, still unknown in written form. They are conventionally referred to as Proto-... (insert any branch name). Further migrations and divisions, mutual contacts as well as contacts with non-IE language communities, conquests and instances of being conquered – all these and many other historical events have led to the enormous linguistic diversity of the modern IE languages.
When and where did it all begin? There is no single answer to this question; different scholars have different pet theories of IE origins and of how the linguistic dispersal of the Indo-Europeans happened.
The most popular current theory is the ‘Pontic steppe hypothesis’, whose chief proponent was the late Lithuanian-born American archaeologist Maria Gimbutas. The Indo-Europeans are identified with the Kurgan (burial mound) archaeological culture of the steppes north and northeast of the Black and Caspian Seas. In the fourth millenium BC, as the story goes, an invasion of the horse-riding, warlike Kurgan people into Europe gave rise to a secondary homeland of the Celtic, Italic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Greek and other ‘European’ branches, while conquests in the south and east produced the various IE languages of India, Persia, Asia Minor etc. Before the coming of the Kurgan riders Europe was inhabited by matriarchal agrarian tribes, worshippers of Mother Earth. The patriarchal Indo-Europeans introduced their own pantheon of nature gods, the chief of whom was Father Sky.
Some scholars, most notably the British archaeologist C. Renfrew, locate the homeland in central Anatolia (modern Turkey) at a much earlier date, at the very beginning of the neolithic age. Renfrew credits the Indo-Europeans with the introduction of agriculture in Europe as early as the 7th millenium BC. His vision of their expansion is one of a slowly growing population of farmers rather than of military conquests and deliberate migrations. Of course the routes of dispersal he proposes are quite different from those of the Pontic steppe theory; one implication of Renfrew's hypothesis would be that most IE peoples are more or less autochthonous in their respective historical locations, having settled there quite a few thousand years ago. Hittite, the oldest written IE language of all (known already from the first half of the 2nd millennium) would, on this theory, have remained in the homeland.
Still other scholars opt for the Balkan Penninsula, the Iranian Plateau, northern/central Europe or India, not to mention Atlantis and the lost land of Mu (not serious scholars, in these cases), as potential homelands. And here is my own favourite solution:
I am inclined to believe a story which is not unlike Renfrew’s but begins a little later. According to it, PIE developed some 8000 years ago in the farming populations living in the lower and middle Danube valley (roughly, modern Romania, western Hungary and part of Austria). Those people were, linguistically, descendants of the mesolithic population of that part of Europe. Historical accident brought them into contact with neolithic farmers who had come from Anatolia, colonising Greece and the Balkans. Because of the natural conditions of Pannonia (the Hungarian Plain, with its steppe lands unsuitable for primitive farming, except in alluvial river valleys) and the rest of central Europe (dense forests that could not be easily cleared with the stone axes used at that time) the northern frontier was of limited interest to the newcomers. The natives, however, managed to adopt neolithic technologies. Their traditions of a mixed, unspecialised mesolithic economy (dependent on fishing, gathering and hunting) enabled them to work out numerous successful adaptations of the earlier neolithic cultures to the new conditions. A new style of building (long houses built of timber, as opposed to Near-Eastern-style bricks of dried clay) developeed at the meeting-line, as well as a new type of pottery (so-called ‘linear’). The IEs were familiar with the local plants and animals, and soon added new domesticates (including the pig and a local variety of cattle, derived from the European aurochs) to those brought earlier from Asia Minor (sheep, goats). They lived mainly along rivers, where the land could be ploughed and fishing was possible. The rivers were also highways for people who knew everything about the use of boats. IE languages have much shared vocabulary consisting of items like ‘(flowing) water’, ‘river’, ‘stream’, etc., but no common word for ‘sea’; the best attested tree names are those of species growing in river valleys (aspen, alder, birch, willow) rather than in central European forests (oak, elm, beech, pine).
The IEs were forced to move their settlements quite regularly, for their primitive farming methods quickly sterilised the arable land around their villages. They had now more food and more children than before, and overpopulation made their groups expand slowly but inevitably in all possible directions. They made, at first, little progress southwards, where other, more civilised neolithic cultures already existed. It is, however, possible that the ancestors of the Hittites separated from the bulk of IEs at that early date and managed to resist complete assimilation among other groups inhabiting the Balkans. The Hittites would finally settle in Turkey, but other Anatolian peoples may have lived in coastal Europe and on the islands of the Aegean Sea.
The main thrust of the expansion (about 5500 BC, marked by the spread of the so-called Linear Pottery culture) was initially to the north and northwest up the big rivers of the Danube system, then into the adjacent systems of the Rhine, Elbe, Oder, Vistula, etc. Between 5000 and 4500 BC part of the early IE population expanded eastwards into the Pontic steppes, domesticating the horse at some point. The wild horse, including steppe and woodland varieties, was common throughout that part of Europe; it had been, for millennia, an important game animal of the palaeolithic and mesolithic hunters. Those who kept sheep and goats colonised the Carpathian pastures. Only later did the IEs cross the Alps, the Pyrennees, the English Channel and the Danish Straits, and expand into central and southern Asia. The original mesolithic inhabitants of northern and western Europe, speaking perhaps languages related to PIE, were overrun and assimilated by the much more numerous farmers and shepherds. This is, in a nutshell, my favourite story. Of course if I ever write a detailed formal justification for it, I’ll try to publish it in some serious linguistic journal. But this is just the Internet and I’m sharing my private opinions with you, who may happen to be interested in such things.
Check it back one day, the story will be continued! There is already some introductory information about the PIE sound system and grammar; you can find some miscellaneous curiosities at Caraculiambro’s.
