An analysis of related words in 161 languages suggests their shared roots lie in the Middle East – a conclusion that also fits with DNA evidence
By Jason Arunn Murugesu
27 July 2023
The ancestor of Indo-European languages may have been spoken by farmers in southern Turkey 8000 years ago
Odyssey-Images / Alamy Stock Photo
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 analysis of related words.
Indo-European languages, spanning from English to Sanskrit, have long been thought to share a common ancestor. The first linguist to make this link, William Jones, said in a lecture in 1786 that no linguist could examine Greek, Latin and Sanskrit together “without believing them to have sprung” from some common ancestor.
But researchers have struggled to agree on the origin story of this so-called proto-Indo-European language, says Paul Heggarty, who is now at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. There are two main hypotheses, he says.
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The first suggests that the language originated in the steppe region, north of the Black Sea, no earlier than 6500 years ago and then spread across Europe and parts of Asia with the domestication of horses.
The second, known as the farming theory, argues that the language was spoken far earlier and originated in the north of the Fertile Crescent, in what is now south-east Turkey and north-west Iran, as early as 9500 years ago and spread to other regions with the rise of farming.
To test these hypotheses, Heggarty and his colleagues created a database consisting of 170 words, such as “night” and “fire”, and their translations in 161 Indo-European languages, including 52 non-modern languages, such as ancient Greek.