The chart shows how some sounds from proto-Indo-European shifted in Germanic languages, such as English, while remaining the same in non-Germanic languages, such as French.

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 ...

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.

Indo-European languages (IE), which number over 400 and include major groups such as Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Indo-Iranian, and Celtic, are spoken by nearly half the world's population today.

Indo-European languages (IE), which number over 400 and include major groups such as Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Indo-Iranian, and Celtic, are spoken by nearly half the world's population today.

A new study claims to have identified the first speakers of Indo-European language, which gave rise to English, Sanskrit and hundreds of others. By Carl Zimmer In 1786, a British judge named ...

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.

This revelation is part of what is said to be a potentially path-breaking initiative to explore Tamil’s connections to Indo-European languages, providing a new perspective on the evolution of words.

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 ...

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 ...