Indo-European Languages Likely Have Hybrid Origins: Study

Paul Heggarty and colleagues present a new framework for the chronology and divergence of languages in the Indo-European family, which places the family's origin at around 8300 BP – older than previous analyses. Their study also reconciles current linguistic and ancient DNA evidence to suggest that Indo-European languages first arose south of the Caucasus and subsequently branched northward to the Steppe regions before expanding throughout Eurasia. The origins and spread of Indo-European languages, which are spoken by nearly half of the world's population, have long been debated. Much of the dispute centers on where the language group originated, with some scholars supporting an origin in the eastern Fertile Crescent that subsequently spread alongside agriculture and others supporting an origin in the Steppe region with spread facilitated by horse-based pastoralism. The new analysis by Heggarty et al. uses a dataset of 100 modern languages and 51 non-modern languages, examining shared word origin among the core vocabulary in these languages. The new dataset increases language sampling and does not necessarily assume that modern spoken languages derive directly from ancient written languages, which the authors say have hampered previous analyses. The resulting phylolinguistic family trees do not fully support either an agriculture or pastoralism-based origin for the language family, but instead support a "hybrid" hypothesis that contains elements of both scenarios in the spread of Indo-European languages, the authors write.