Lessons on language families are often illustrated with a simple tree diagram that has all the information but lacks imagination. There’s no reason linguistics has to be so visually uninspiring.

A team of researchers is using a novel technique to comb through the data and to reconstruct major branches in the linguistic tree ... European -- a major proto-language that split into the ...

Some say the language group emerged from the steppes north of the Black Sea 4,000 years ago with the migrations of chariot-driving nomads; others argue it dates further back -- some 9,000 years ...