Indo-European languages kept spreading, and the plague survivors would have adopted the newcomers’ languages. In Europe today, only the Basques still speak a language spoken before the pandemic.

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.

The dead Indo-European sister languages left their ghostly mark, curiously, in a clutch of words for animals with big feet: Dutch pad (toad), Irish pata (hare), Welsh pathew (dormouse).

Michael Rosen hears the fascinating story of the origin of all Indo-European languages from author Laura Spinney. Today, nearly half of humanity speaks an Indo-European language. Show more ...

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 ...

The world’s languages were not a babel but a brotherhood. “Proto”, a new book by Laura Spinney, a journalist who has written for this newspaper, offers a biography of that brotherhood—or ...

From the shores of the Black Sea nearly 6,000 years ago to the crowded streets of modern London and Delhi, one ancient language has left its mark on nearly half the world's population – without ...

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global Laura Spinney. Bloomsbury, $29.99 (336p) ISBN 978-1-63973-258-6 ...

Among the arresting things that Reich et al. argue is that we should speak of a precursor to Proto-Indo-European: Proto-Indo-Anatolian, which they believe split sometime between 4300 and 3500 B.C.

Thinking about proto-languages is not everyone’s cup of tea, but surely only a dullard would deny the inherent wonder of being able to peer into the linguistic past in this way.

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 ...