It has long been established that Indo-European languages, such as English, Greek and Hindi belong to a family of languages first observed in common ancestors thousands of years ago. New research has uncovered more details about this language family, providing more exact information as to when and where it was likeliest to have been used.
Linguists from the University of California, Berkeley analyzed more than 150 languages and found that the ancestor language was in use at the Pontiac-Caspian steppe from western Kazakhstan and Russia to Ukraine and Moldova between 5,500 and 6,500 years ago. The research was documented in a paper to be published in the journal Language.
According to Will Chang and colleagues, their research offers new evidence supporting the Kurgan or steppe hypothesis, which proposed that Indo-European languages started spreading first as cultural developments in livestock flourished from 4,000 to 3,500 BCE.
An alternate theory in existence counters that the spread of the languages started much earlier, already in action about 7,500 to 6,000 BCE in Anatolia in Turkey.
To explore the history of Indo-European languages, the researches examined more than 200 sets of words from both historical and living languages. Using a statistical model to assess how quickly the word sets changed over a period of time, they were able to determine that how fast the words changed was indicative that the first languages to use the words started diverging from the language family about 6,500 years ago, a timeframe that fits very well with the steppe hypothesis.
The work of Chang and colleagues represents one of the first quantitative evidence that supports the steppe hypothesis and is also the first to utilize a model that factored in ancestry constraints responsible for more directly integrated language relationships previously discovered. Their paper also discussed previous studies that have supported and countered the steppe hypothesis.
Other researchers are Andrew Garrett, David Hall and Chundra Cathcart.
There are more than 6,900 living languages in the world today. Out of that number, 516 have been considered to be nearly extinct. English is the most widely spoken language by non-natives while Mandarin Chinese has the greatest number of native speakers. Papua New Guinea is home to 820 living languages while Greek and Chinese are competing for the distinction of being the oldest written language still in existence today. Out of all the languages, English boasts having the most number of distinct words at about 250,000. Taki Taki, an English-based Creole language in Suriname, has the least with 340.
