Research Shows Indo-European Languages Originated in Turkey

Aug 24, 2012 by Sergio Prostak
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An innovative computational approach applied by an international team of linguists sheds new light on the origins of Indo-European languages.

Map shows the present-day distribution of the branches of the Indo-European family (Hayden120 / CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Indo-European languages belong to one of the widest spread language families of the world. For the last two millennia, many of these languages have been written, and their history is relatively clear. But controversy remains about the time and place of the origins of the family.

The majority view in historical linguistics is that the homeland of Indo-European is located in the Pontic steppes – present day Ukraine – around 6,000 years ago. The evidence for this comes from linguistic paleontology: in particular, certain words to do with the technology of wheeled vehicles are arguably present across all the branches of the Indo-European family; and archaeology tells us that wheeled vehicles arose no earlier than this date.

The minority view links the origins of Indo-European with the spread of farming from Anatolia 8,000-9,500 years ago. The team’s innovative Bayesian phylogeographic analysis of Indo-European linguistic and spatial data, including basic vocabulary data from 103 ancient and contemporary Indo-European languages, decisively supports this theory. The linguists report their results in a paper in the journal Science.

The analysis combines a model of the evolution of the lexicons of individual languages with an explicit spatial model of the dispersal of the speakers of those languages. Known events in the past are used to calibrate the inferred family tree against time.

The lexical data used in this analysis come from the Indo-European Lexical Cognacy Database. This database provides a large, high-quality collection of language data suitable for phylogenetic analysis. Beyond the intrinsic interest of uncovering the history of language families and their speakers, phylogenetic trees are crucially important for understanding evolution and diversity in many human sciences, from syntax and semantics to social structure.

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Bibliographic information: Bouckaert et al. 2012. Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family. Science, vol. 337, no. 6097, pp. 957-960; doi: 10.1126/science.1219669

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  • Vladimir Pomakov

    Compared by soil diversity, relative biodiversity, climatic/weather conditions, and some others environmental factors I am prone to think that not Anatolia but the Balkan Peninsula is the Proto-Indo-Europeans’ urheimat, with its aboriginal population of ancient Scythians. In fact, the Balkan Peninsula was the focus of origin of Scythians, the Pontic steppe region being a secondary focus of Scythians once their population expansion had started after the Deluge (the Biblical one). This idea of mine is strongly supported by the numerous kurgans (tumuli, settlement mounds) dispersed over a huge area in Asia – starting from Pontic steppe region and ending somewhere to the east of Lake Baikal – Buryat Republic (to the north of Mongolia), River Tarim basin including the mummies of Taklamakan desert (all of proved Scythian origin), Republic of Tuva, Altai Mountains, etc.

    Also, I would like to remind that the horse as we know it today originates from domesticated by Scythians wild horse “tarpan” which originally occurred in the Pontic steppe region.

    • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_NGU3DAAIHVPK6K3B7Z323X6IXM jack

      My own bias favors Kurdistan, now southern Anatolia. The Kurds are understood to have developed the first food basket 9,000 years ago and introduced farming throughout Europe. The Kurdish food basket included wheat, olives, grapes, garbanzo beans, and lentils.

  • http://www.facebook.com/nicol.kirs Nicol Kirs

    unique code to form an action a name (24 + codes to build up any language in the world)