The Indo-European language family: A new perspective

According to linguistics professor Kim Schulte in an article published by The Conversation, experts who study the history of languages have been working to reconstruct the first Indo-European language (Proto-Indo-European) and establish a "language family tree" using phylogenetics.

Many questions remain about the origin of Indo-European, such as where the original Indo-European language was spoken in prehistoric times, how long it grew, and how it spread across Eurasia. There are two main hypotheses: the Anatolian Hypothesis and the Steppe Hypothesis, as indicated by Schulte.

As per Schulte, a new study published in Science has approached the question from a different angle by using direct linguistic data to assess the timelines put forward by both hypotheses. The study was carried out by over 80 linguists under the direction of Paul Heggarty and Cormac Anderson from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, as reported in The Conversation.

The study showed that an Italo-Celtic language family cannot exist, as the Italic and Celtic languages separated several centuries before the separation of the Germanic and Celtic languages around 5,000 years ago. Regarding the origin of Indo-European languages, calculations based on the new data show that they were first spoken approximately 8,000 years ago, according to Schulte.