Indo-European Languages

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The Indo-European languages are a language family that originated in western and southern Eurasia. It includes most of the languages of Europe as well as ones from northern Indian subcontinent and Iran. English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Danish, Dutch, Spanish, Hindi, Farsi, Greek, Italian are all Indo-Europe languages. 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. An additional six subdivisions are now extinct. [Source: Wikipedia]

The Indo-European family of language includes most languages spoken from Ireland to Russia to the northern half of India. Around 46 percent of the world's population (3.2 billion people) speaks an Indo-European language as a first language, far and away the largest of any language family. According to Ethnologue, there are about 445 Indo-European languages still spoken today, with over two-thirds of them in the Indo-Iranian branch. The most widely-spoken individual Indo-European languages are English, Hindustani, Spanish, Bengali, French, Russian, Portuguese, German, Persian and Punjabi, each with over 100 million speakers. Among the Indo-European languages that are small and in danger of extinction are Cornish, which has fewer than 600 speakers.

All Indo-European languages are descended from a single prehistoric language, reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European (PIE), spoken sometime in the Neolithic to early Bronze age. The Indo-European family is not known to be linked to any other language family through any more distant genetic relationship, although several disputed proposals to that effect have been made.

The earliest written Indo-European language — Mycenaean Greek and the Anatolian languages, Hittite and Luwian — appeared during the Bronze Age. The oldest examples are isolated Hittite words and names found in Old Assyrian Akkadian language texts found in the texts of the Assyrian colony of Kültepe in eastern Anatolia in the 20th century B.C.. Akkadian was a Semitic language.

The Sinhala language of Sri Lanka is an Aryan Indo-European language related to other Indo-Aryan speeches such as Hindi and Bengali. It also is distantly related to other major languages such as German, French, English, Russian, Persian and Lithuanian. The fact is that Sinhala is not only a member of the Aryan group of languages, but also of a larger linguistic group, the Indo-European family, which includes all the major languages of Europe, Iran and Southern Asia.

The Indo-European family is important is of historical linguistics as it has the-longest recorded history of any known family after the ancient Egyptian language and the Semitic languages. The analysis of the family relationships between the Indo-European languages and the reconstruction of their common source, was the cornerstone of establishing historical linguistics as an academic discipline in the 19th century.

Yamnaya Culture

20120209-Lion-hunt_relief_(Aslantepe).jpg
Hittite Lion-hunt relief around 1200 B.C.
at Aslantepe Indo-European culture and language are believed to have begun with the Yamnaya culture, an ancient culture that existed in present-day Ukraine and Russia between the Southern Bug, Dniester, and Ural rivers from 3300 B.C. to 2600 B.C. Regarded as the source of Indo-European languages and pioneers of wheeled vehicles, it was discovered by Vasily Gorodtsov during archaeological excavations near the Donets River in 1901 — 1903. Its name is derived from Russian adjective “yama” which means “related to pits” — a reference to the Yamnaya culture custom of burying their dead in kurgans (tumuli) that contained simple pit chambers. [Source: Wikipedia]

The Yamnaya culture is also known as the Yamna culture, the Pit Grave culture and the Ochre Grave culture. Its economy was based on animal husbandry, fishing, and foraging, and produced ceramics, tools, and weapons. The people of the Yamnaya culture lived primarily as nomads under a chiefdom system and used wheeled carts and wagons to get around and manage large herds of animals. They are also closely connected to Final Neolithic cultures — namely the Corded Ware people, and the Bell Beaker, Sintashta, Andronovo, and Srubnaya cultures — which later spread throughout Europe and Central Asia, Yamnaya material culture is very similar to the Afanasevo culture of South Siberia, and the populations of both cultures are genetically indistinguishable. This suggests that the Afanasevo culture originated from a migration of Yamnaya groups to the Altai region or, alternatively, that both cultures developed from an earlier shared cultural source.

The Yamnaya were horse-riding cattle herders who built imposing grave mounds called kurgans. Andrew Curry wrote in National Geographic: The Yamnaya were “some of the first people in the world to ride horses and master the wheel. They were building wagons and following herds of cattle across the grasslands. They built few permanent settlements. But they buried their most prominent men with bronze and silver ornaments in mighty grave mounds that still dot the steppes. [Source: Andrew Curry, National Geographic, August 2019]

According to the widely-accepted Kurgan hypothesis, of Marija Gimbutas, the people that produced the Yamnaya culture spoke a stage of the Proto Indo-European language, which later spread eastwards and westwards as part of the Indo-European migrations. The Yamnaya culture also brought domesticated horses and a mobile lifestyle based on wagons into Stone Age Europe. Their innovative metal weapons and tools, helped bring the Bronze Age to Europe.

Proto-Indo-Europeans

The Proto-Indo-Europeans are a hypothetical prehistoric population of Eurasia who spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the ancestor of the Indo-European languages according to linguistic reconstruction. [Source: Wikipedia]

20120217-Iliad Achill_erschlaegt_Hektor.jpg
Achilles dragging Hector
from a chariot in the Iliad Knowledge of them comes chiefly from that linguistic reconstruction, along with material evidence from archaeology and archaeogenetics. The Proto-Indo-Europeans likely lived during the late Neolithic, or roughly the 4th millennium B.C.. Mainstream scholarship places them in the Pontic–Caspian steppe zone in Eastern Europe (present day Ukraine and southern Russia). Some archaeologists would extend the time depth of PIE to the middle Neolithic (5500 to 4500 B.C.) or even the early Neolithic (7500 to 5500 B.C.), and suggest alternative location hypotheses.

Proto- Indo-European language are believed to have been spoken in Southern Russia and Ukraine around 4500 to 3000 B.C. before its speakers dispersed to Europe and Asia, taking their languages with them. The German linguist August Schleicher was the first scholar to attempt the reconstruction of this Proto-Indo-European language. He did so on “Compendium der Vergleichenden Grammatik der Indogermanischen” (“A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin Languages”) published in 1861. Schleicher's examined many of the then known extinct and extant Indo-European languages from which he deduced what the oldest forms would have sounded like. These hypothetical reconstructed forms continue to be used to this day. Schleicher also went on to publish a fable composed in this hypothetical language entitled “The Sheep and the Horses”.

By the early second millennium B.C., descendants of the Proto-Indo-Europeans had reached far and wide across Eurasia, including Anatolia (Hittites), the Aegean (the linguistic ancestors of Mycenaean Greece), the north of Europe (Corded Ware culture), the edges of Central Asia (Yamnaya culture), and southern Siberia (Afanasievo culture).

The precise geographical location of the Proto-Indo-European homeland — the Indo-European urheimat — is unknown and has been the subject of intense scholarly debate. The most widely accepted of many the competing hypotheses is the Kurgan hypothesis, which posits the urheimat to be the Pontic–Caspian steppe, associated with the Yamnaya culture around 3000 B.C.. By the time the first written records appeared, Indo-European had already evolved into numerous languages spoken across much of Europe and south-west Asia.

Spread of Indo-European Culture and Languages

Shoaib Daniyal wrote: About half of the planet’s population today speaks an Indo-European language. This is a remarkable fact: It means that around three billion people speak tongues that descended from what was, once upon a time, a single language and was spoken by a group of nomads whose numbers wouldn’t have been larger than that of a tribal confederation. [Source:Shoaib Daniyal, Scroll, Quartz India, June 11, 2015]

“How did this single language, which linguists have taken to calling Proto-Indo-European, spread across the word, giving rise to entities as diverse as Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, French, Persian and Bhojpuri? The nomadic tribes that spoke the language spread through large parts of the known world around 6,000 years ago. In the words of anthropologist David W. Anthony, writing in his fantastic book on the spread of the Indo-Europeans, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World:

“The people who spoke the Proto-Indo-European language lived at a critical time in a strategic place. They were positioned to benefit from innovations in transport, most important of these being the beginning of horseback riding and the invention of wheeled vehicles. Horses, wagons and chariots gave these Indo-Europeans certain advantages militarily over the existing settled societies of Europe and Asia. Another innovation was biological: Indo-Europeans developed a gene mutation that allowed them to digest milk even after being weaned, thus providing these nomads with a continuous and mobile source of nutrition. We can see echoes of these historical facts in the culture of the early Vedic people who venerated horses and frowned upon the killing of milch cattle.

Indo-European migrations

“While this much the experts agree on, there are two competing hypotheses for the place of origin of these Indo-Europeans (or, as they were earlier known, the Aryans). The conventional view places their homeland in the Pontic steppe, which corresponds to modern-day Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. An alternative hypothesis claims that the Proto-Indo-Europeans spread from Anatolia in modern-day Turkey. The latter hypothesis was recently backed up by a seminal study led by evolutionary biologist Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, which was published in the journal Science.”

Kurgan Hypothesis

Kurgan hypothesis (also known as the Kurgan theory or Kurgan model) or Steppe theory is the most widely accepted proposal to identify the Proto-Indo-European homeland. The term is derived from the Russian word kurgan, meaning tumulus or burial mound. [Source: Wikipedia]

The Steppe theory was first formulated by Otto Schrader (1883) and V. Gordon Childe (1926) and systematized in the 1950s by Marija Gimbutas, who used the term to group various prehistoric cultures, including the Yamnaya (or Pit Grave) culture and its predecessors. Gimbutas defined the Kurgan culture as composed of four successive periods, with the earliest (Kurgan I) including the Samara and Seroglazovo cultures of the Dnieper–Volga region in the Copper Age (early 4th millennium B.C.). The people of these cultures were nomadic pastoralists, who, according to the model, by the early 3rd millennium B.C. had expanded throughout the Pontic–Caspian steppe and into Eastern Europe.

Three genetic studies in 2015 gave partial support to the Kurgan Hypothesis. According to those studies, haplogroups R1b and R1a, now the most common in Europe (R1a is also common in South Asia) expanded from the steppes north of the Pontic and Caspian seas, along with at least some of the Indo-European languages, The studies also detected a genetic marker present in modern Europeans which was not present in Neolithic Europeans, which plausibly could have been introduced with paternal lineages R1b and R1a, as well as Indo-European languages.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Greece sourcebooks.fordham.edu, gutenberg.org National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Live Science, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Encyclopædia Britannica, "The Discoverers" and "The Creators" by Daniel Boorstin, Wikipedia, “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books) and various books and other publications.

Last updated May 2024