In “Proto,” Laura Spinney details the centurieslong effort to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European (PIE), what linguists believe to be the mother tongue of a diverse constellation of languages from ...

5,000 years ago, the Yamnaya culture migrated into Europe from the Caspian steppe. In addition to innovations such as the wagon and dairy production, they brought a new language -- Indo-European ...

Around half of the world’s population speaks a descendant of Proto-Indo-European. Most know little about it. Share. Illustration: Ben Hickey. May 8th 2025 | 2 min read. Listen to this story.

Proto Indo-European is thought to be one of the precursor to languages as diverse as English and Hindi. Google Translate Languages are constantly evolving, spawning offshoots and mashups and cross ...

A new linguistic study sheds light on the nature of languages spoken before the written period, using computational modeling to reconstruct the grammar of the 6500-7000 year-old Proto-Indo ...

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was spoken by a people who lived from roughly 4500 to 2500 B.C., and left no written texts. The question became, what did PIE sound like? In 1868, ...

The common ancestor of Indo-European languages, which are now spoken by close to half the world’s population, was spoken in the eastern Mediterranean around 8000 years ago, according to an ...

In 2012, a team from the University of Auckland in New Zealand estimated that Proto-Indo-European is even older, perhaps originating 8,000 to 9,500 years ago. As for its geographic origins, they ...

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 ...