Among the Indo-European languages are English, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Hindi-Urdu and Persian. At the head of the family tree is the postulated language we call Proto-Indo-European, or ...

Laura Spinney’s “Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global” explores the roots of language and how it spread and changed across time and place.

James Clackson, a linguist at Cambridge University, also finds the early date for Proto-Indo-European, and other details of the tree, unconvincing.

The language that changed the world Around half of the world’s population speaks a descendant of Proto-Indo-European. Most know little about it ...

The answer, in fact, sits above and across those words: Proto-Indo-European. This is the great original language from which English, among many other tongues, both alive and dead, derives.

They agree that the original language, which they call Proto-Indo-European, split into 10 or 11 main branches, two of which are now extinct.

Harvard researchers traced the origins of the vast Indo-European language family to the Caucasus-Lower Volga region, identifying the ancestral population that gave rise to more than 400 languages ...

The Proto-Indo-European language emerged 6,000 years ago around the Black Sea when the Yamnaya, a group of nomadic herders, shifted into mining and farming—and interacted with others who ...

Yet, interestingly, the taxonomy of languages has indicated a language-tree that starts with a small set of proto-languages that has branched out into daughter languages with the passage of time ...

Originating from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language, historians and linguists since the 19th century have been investigating its origins and spread as there is still a knowledge gap.