A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree, or in a subsequent modification, to species in a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy. Linguists therefore describe the daughter languages within a language family as being genetically related.

According to Ethnologue the 7,111 living human languages are distributed in 141 different language families. A "living language" is simply one that is used as the primary form of communication of a group of people. There are also many dead and extinct languages, as well as some that are still insufficiently studied to be classified, or are even unknown outside their respective speech communities.

Membership of languages in a language family is established by comparative linguistics. Sister languages are said to have a "genetic" or "genealogical" relationship. The latter term is older.[3] Speakers of a language family belong to a common speech community. The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, with the original speech community gradually evolving into distinct linguistic units. Individuals belonging to other speech communities may also adopt languages from a different language family through the language shift process.

Genealogically related languages present shared retentions; that is, features of the proto-language (or reflexes of such features) that cannot be explained by chance or borrowing (convergence). Membership in a branch or group within a language family is established by shared innovations; that is, common features of those languages that are not found in the common ancestor of the entire family. For example, Germanic languages are "Germanic" in that they share vocabulary and grammatical features that are not believed to have been present in the Proto-Indo-European language. These features are believed to be innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, a descendant of Proto-Indo-European that was the source of all Germanic languages.

Scholars first noticed similarities between Sanskrit and Latin and Greek in the sixteenth century, as Europeans came into contact with India. But it was the British Asiatic Society in eighteenth century India under Sir William Jones that compared words across the three languages and found remarkable similarities. From this it was deduced that a common ‘Proto-Indo-European’ (PIE) root lay at the heart of all three languages and their peoples. This linked them back to an ancestral homeland that was probably located in the sweeping expanse of the steppes of Central Asia, to the north of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. Scholars disagree about the precise location of this homeland even today, with a variety of others being proposed that include Anatolia and post-glacial Europe itself. Even so, the aforementioned steppes are still the favoured location, providing as they did a home to many later, similar groups of nomads such as the Huns and Turks.

How these people got there is unknown, but India was one of the first places to be colonised by early humans after they left Africa around 90-70,000 years ago (see the Hominid Chronology feature). Some of these people stayed where they were and others continued to follow the coastline to populate China and South East Asia. It seems likely that, after migrating inland, others further migrated northwards and in time formed communities around the steppes. Whether these communities existed in an unbroken line down to their developing into proto-Indo-Europeans can never be known. But however they developed, the proto-Indo-Europeans were in existence by the sixth millennium BC, in a homeland that seems to have been located somewhere between the Caucuses Mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, and the northern shores of those same seas. Their subsequent migration is a hugely complex and contentious subject.

Whatever unknown level of unity these early Indo-Europeans may have had, they began to divide in the third millennium BC. Various groups migrated out of Central Asia from then onwards, pushed westwards and southwards by a combination of climate change, population movements, and perhaps pressure from other peoples further east. Their once-single language gradually altered into various dialects that can be divided into twelve branches, ten of which contain surviving languages. Very briefly, these are the Anatolians (the Hittites, Luwians, Lydians, and Pala), the Balts (such as the Latvians, Lithuanians, and Old Prussians on the eastern Baltic Sea coast), Celts (who once dominated Central and Western Europe), the Germanic peoples (who originate from Old Norse and Saxon peoples), the Greeks (most notably the Mycenaeans and Athenians), the Illyrians (of the northern and eastern Adriatic coast, surviving in Albania and with a level of heritage in southern Italy), the Indians (the disputed Indo-Aryan peoples as opposed to the pre-existing Dravidic groups who were generally pushed southwards), the Iranians (in the form of the Alani, Mannaeans, Medians, Persians, Scythians, and others), the Latins (embodied by the Romans), the Slavs (who emerged to dominate Eastern Europe by the medieval period), the Thracians (of northern Greece and the Balkans which also includes Armenians), and finally the Tocharians (in north-western China, who were closely related to the Anatolian, Celtic, and Latin branches).

Recent genetic testing of living peoples, and ancient remains, are pointing in a slightly different direction from the standing Caucasian Mountains origin for Indo-Europeans. Males carry and transmit via their Y chromosome the history of male migration, critical for tracing the movements of warrior societies. Indo-European Y chromosomes carry two primary 'flavours', called R1a and R1b by geneticists. R1a is found strongly in Slavs, Balts, and Indo-Iranians, and is mixed with R1b in Germanic-speaking peoples. The geographic distribution in ancient times for R1a is European Russia just west of the Ural Mountains. R1b is found among other Indo-Europeans, being prominent among ancient Celts, Italics and similar (although it's important to note that not all R1b are Indo-Europeans). Geographic distribution appears to have begun with early cattle herders in south-eastern Turkey and northern Iraq, some of whom moved into the pasturage on the open steppes of Asia to the east of the Caspian Sea. What we have is an origin in the Russian forest and forest-steppe for half the Indo-Europeans (those linguistically matching the satem (East) branch of Indo-European languages, and occupying half the territory previously assigned to Uralics), and an open steppe origin for all other Indo-Europeans (matching the centum (West) branch of Indo-European languages). This threatens to invalidate the previously dominant theory of a Caucasian Mountains homeland for the Indo-Europeans, instead moving them farther north and east. It remains to be seen whether this DNA-based theory will supersede the established linguistics theory.

(Information by Peter Kessler and Edward Dawson, with additional information by Jo Amdahl, from The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, David W Anthony, from A Genetic Signal of Central European Celtic Ancestry, David K Faux, from the BBC Radio 3 programme with Bettany Hughes, Tracking the Aryans, 2011, and from External Links: Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe, Nature.com, and Peering at the Tocharians through Language, and Indo-European Chronology - Countries and Peoples, and also Indo-European Etymological Dictionary, J Pokorny.)

No direct evidence of PIE remains – scholars have reconstructed PIE from its present-day descendants using the comparative method.

The comparative method follows the Neogrammarian rule: the Indo-European sound laws apply without exception. The method compares languages and uses the sound laws to find a common ancestor. For example, compare the pairs of words in Italian and English: piede and foot, padre and father, pesce and fish. Since there is a consistent correspondence of the initial consonants that emerges far too frequently to be coincidental, one can assume that these languages stem from a common parent-language.

Many consider William Jones, an Anglo-Welsh philologist and puisne judge in Bengal, to have begun Indo-European studies in 1786, when he postulated the common ancestry of Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek. However, he was not the first to make this observation. In the 1500s, European visitors to the Indian subcontinent became aware of similarities between Indo-Iranian languages and European languages, and as early as 1653 Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn had published a proposal for a proto-language ("Scythian") for the following language families: Germanic, Romance, Greek, Baltic, Slavic, Celtic, and Iranian. In a memoir sent to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1767 Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux, a French Jesuit who spent all his life in India, had specifically demonstrated the analogy between Sanskrit and European languages. In some ways, Jones' work was less accurate than his predecessors', as he erroneously included Egyptian, Japanese and Chinese in the Indo-European languages, while omitting Hindi.

In 1818 Rasmus Christian Rask elaborated the set of correspondences to include other Indo-European languages, such as Sanskrit and Greek, and the full range of consonants involved. In 1816 Franz Bopp published On the System of Conjugation in Sanskrit in which he investigated a common origin of Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and German. In 1833 he began publishing the Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavic, Gothic, and German.

In 1822 Jacob Grimm formulated what became known as Grimm's law as a general rule in his Deutsche Grammatik. Grimm showed correlations between the Germanic and other Indo-European languages and demonstrated that sound change systematically transforms all words of a language. From the 1870s the Neogrammarians proposed that sound laws have no exceptions, as shown in Verner's law, published in 1876, which resolved apparent exceptions to Grimm's law by exploring the role that accent (stress) had played in language change.

August Schleicher's A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin Languages (1874-77) represented an early attempt to reconstruct the proto-Indo-European language.

By the early 1900s Indo-Europeanists had developed well-defined descriptions of PIE which scholars still accept today. Later, the discovery of the Anatolian and Tocharian languages added to the corpus of descendant languages. A new principle won wide acceptance in the laryngeal theory, which explained irregularities in the linguistic reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European phonology as the effects of hypothetical sounds which had disappeared from all documented languages, but which were later observed in excavated cuneiform tablets in Anatolian.

Julius Pokorny's Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch ("Indo-European Etymological Dictionary", 1959) gave a detailed, though conservative, overview of the lexical knowledge then accumulated. Kuryłowicz's 1956 Apophonie gave a better understanding of Indo-European ablaut. From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian became robust enough to establish its relationship to PIE.

Much of our modern ideas in this field involve the unsettled Indo-European homeland debate about the precise origins of the language itself. There are three main approaches researchers have employed in their attempts to study this culture, but all are subject to resolution of the debate and all are the subject of criticism:

• Archeology: Interpretations that are based on archaeological evidence.
• Comparative linguistics: Interpretations that are based on the comparative analysis of the languages of historically known societies (see Trifunctional hypothesis).
• Linguistic reconstruction: Interpretations that are based on the reconstruction and identification of words (those cited *thus on this page, with a preceding asterisk) which formed part of the vocabulary of the Proto-Indo-European language. These are reconstructed on the basis of sounds, not meaning. Exactly what these terms may have referred to at the stage of Proto-Indo-European is therefore less certain. The technique of inferring culture from such reconstructions is known as linguistic palaeontology.

What follows in this page are interpretations based only on the assumption of the Kurgan hypothesis of Indo-European origins, and are by no means universally accepted.

Those peoples who are now known as Indo-Europeans (IEs) were the most widely ranging ethnic group in ancient times. Due to their existence on the steppes as cattle and horse raising people, they were quite mobile — a characteristic which they shared with other steppe nomads such as the Turkic and Hunnic peoples.

Background

Indo-European is proposed to be a member of a much older macro family called Nostratic.

This includes the Uralic, Altaic and Kartvelian languages, and with a lower probability also languages spoken in India, North Africa, and the Arabian peninsula. Kartvelian-speaking tribes would have been close neighbours to the original Indo-Europeans in the Caucasian Mountains — the apparent difference between them would be that Kartvelian speakers stayed home in the mountains, while Indo-European speakers expanded.

This expansion was almost certainly caused by the adoption of horse-drawn wagons by the Indo-Europeans. This led to led to the use of chariots in war, and finally to riding horses for various purposes.

There are various theories about the precise location of their original homeland. A personal leaning is for the most probable theory, that they were originally located somewhere on the northern edge of the Caucasus Mountains. These form a range of peaks that sits between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea and which today is largely within the borders of Georgia and the southern tip of Russia. The IEs then expanded out from there, most of them going north into the steppes.

Map 1: The northern edge of the Caucuses Mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea is the most probable homeland for the proto-Indo-Europeans, cut off as they would have been from their fellow Eurasiatic speakers (one branch of the post-glacial Nostratic language group). These other Eurasiatic speakers would have occupied large tracts of territory themselves, probably including the main inland regions between the two seas.

Migrations

A full timeline of events can be seen in the accompanying list (see link in the sidebar, right). But a brief recap here would be useful. The separation of the proto-Indo-European (PIE) language from its parent Nostratic tongue took place approximately at the 6000 BC mark (see the first map, above).

One can speculate that this occurred via isolation in a mountainous region (hence favouring the Caucuses Mountains as a homeland). This would be prior to the 'Kurgan Hypothesis' homeland.[1]

The beginnings of Indo-European expansion took place around 4000 BC (see Map 2, below), and with it the beginning of areal dialects.[2] The Anatolian dialect began to move southwards, signifying the migration of one group of Indo-Europeans away from the rest. Most of the others appear to have begun an expansion northwards into the Pontic-Caspian steppe.

[1] The Kurgan Hypothesis homeland theory is the dominant theory to explain the migrations of Indo-Europeans and the early cultures that they formed. Map of Indo-European migrations from c. 4000 to 1000 BC according to the Kurgan model. The magenta area corresponds to the assumed urheimat (Samara culture, Sredny Stog culture). The red area corresponds to the area that may have been settled by Indo-European-speaking peoples up to c. 2500 BC, and the orange area by 1000 BC. [2] Areal dialects are a common language that is spread over a division of areas and spaces with regional differences emerging.

Was the horse domesticated and the horse-drawn wagon adopted at this time? This is the Kurgan Hypothesis homeland period, also known as the 'Pontic Steppe Hypothesis', with the majority of Indo-Europeans inhabiting the steppes to the north of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. The archaeological evidence so far is too inconclusive to provide a definite source of origin for the Indo-Europeans, and some of the more outlandish theories place it far away from this region, but the Pontic steppe is the favoured theory.

These early Indo-Europeans were identified by scholars with warrior pastoralists who built kurgan (burial mounds — a Turkic loan word in Russian which is often used to identify the Indo-Europeans prior to their expansion) in the steppes to the north of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea in what is now southern Russia and Ukraine.

However, the core of this particular study focuses on the expansion as shown by language shifts rather than other means.

Map 2: The initial expansion of Indo-Europeans took place around 4000 BC, with one group heading southwards towards Anatolia and Northern Mesopotamia. The eastern route down the shores of the Caspian Sea used here is conjectural — they might just have easily used the western route down the Black Sea coast — but it's likely that the coastline offered the safest migratory route, travelling with horses and families and avoiding hostile populations inland. The main body expanded into the Pontic-Caspian steppe, a vast stretch of plains to the north of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. The South IEs probably remained in touch with their northern kin until around 3500 BC.

South IEs

The Anatolian branch of Indo-European language appears to have separated from the rest around 3500 BC; it retained many archaic features which were lost among the other branches of Indo-European, indicating a clear separation between the two branches at this time (south and north).

The ancestor tongue of Hatti (Hittite), Luwian (many sub-branches), Lydian, and Palaic migrated from the Indo-European homeland and moved south through the mountains. Eventually it reached the highlands of the Anatolian peninsula. From there the Hatti speakers (Hittites) manage to form an empire that encompassed most of Anatolia (although they were much later in establishing themselves than the Luwian-speakers).

Core IEs beginning to divide

Around 3000 BC, the remaining Indo-Europeans (now excluding the Anatolian branch) probably began the process of separating into definite proto languages which were not intelligible to each other. A western group would evolve into the Celtic, Italic, Venetic, Illyrian, Ligurian, Vindelician/Liburnian and Raetic branches.

Map 3: The Indo-Europeans of the Pontic-Caspian steppe began to migrate out of their core territory around 3000 BC, while those who remained behind — the East IEs — eventually integrated themselves into the Oxus Civilisation and probably then supplied the Aryans of India and Iran.

Early in this western group's expansion, one tribe apparently made a U-turn and headed eastwards (which is easy enough to do when you are a steppe nomad!) to evolve into the Tocharian branch of Indo-Europeans.

A north-western branch began the German ethnic group. A northern branch founded what would become Baltic and Slavic peoples. Proto-Greeks formed a south-western branch, probably along with Thracians, Dacians, and Phrygians, all of which seem to have been related to the Armenians. An eastern, or 'stay at home' branch apparently calling themselves Arya or something similar formed the ancestors of Indians, Kurds, Iranians, Mannaeans, Medians, and related peoples.

Language division theories

There are two theories about the splitting of the proto-Indo-European language (PIE) into divergent languages. One is the tree theory, which illustrates them separating like the branches of a tree. The other is the wave theory, which indicates dialects in contact influencing their neighbours. Both theories would seem to be correct to some degree. In truth both would have happened depending on the degree of mutual contact and/or isolation.

Furthermore, there is evidence that branches which split apart in the manner of the tree model can adopt a linguistic trend or custom from each other. One of the most glaring examples of this would be the shift from PIE's ancestral 'kw' sound to 'p' in both Celtic and Italic tongues across a central area of Europe, something that was not adopted by geographically-isolated Celts in Spain and Ireland, or those Italics to the west of the Pennines.

Another is the satem/centum[3] split. For convenience, and no other reason, the tree model is used here. Whilst it is generally too simplistic for a complete explanation, using a wave model would make the branches incoherent.

[3] This term refers to the east/west split (respectively) in Indo-European language groups. The satem described all of the eastern IE language groups, and centum the western. This is discussed further in the 'Easternmost IEs' section, below.
These late Iron Age artefacts come from a Lithuanian cremation burial — descendants of North IEs,

North IEs

The 'leading edge' of the Balto-Slavic group seems to have become proto-Balts, and their southern relatives, proto-Slavs. These two moved north from the other Indo-Europeans, or were already somewhat to the north of them anyway, semi-isolated forest-dwellers. They appear to have moved into (or remained largely located within) forested river valleys during the early stages of IE migration and, if they ever had it, gave up the semi-nomadic or fully nomadic lifestyle as a result.

North-West IEs

The proto-Germans migrated into southern Scandinavia and the Jutland peninsula.

Some peculiarities that distinguish proto-Germanic from other Indo-European tongues may have been borrowed from Finnic languages. There also appears to have been heavy cultural contact with their neighbours to the immediate south, the Celts. They borrowed at least one deity (Taranis, better known as Thor). They also appear to borrowed a prominent peculiarity of pronunciation that was associated with the Celtic influence on their religion. The Celtic 'gw' or 'gu' instead of 'w' was adopted in speech, so that the word for a magician, 'wod/woth', became 'god/goth', meaning a deity. The 'gw' became 'g' and, in at least one recorded instance, a 'k', as the Baltic Sea was recorded by the Romans as the Codanus Sinus.

There appears to have been two conflicting groups of deities who were honoured by early Indo-Europeans; these are best known by their Vedic names of Devas and Asuras. Some cultures honoured both, but most chose one or the other as dominant one. The proto-Germans seem to have chosen the Asuras as dominant, under their dialectal variant 'Os', otherwise known as 'Aesir'.

West IEs

This language group dominated most of Europe in ancient times, and still does in western Europe. Its member languages are Celtic, Italic, Venetic, Illyrian, Ligurian, Vindelician/Liburnian, and Raetic branches. West Indo-Europeans are probably best known for their geographically wide-ranging group, the Celts, who in turn adopted Latin once they had been conquered by the Romans.

This group's most influential member language, however, is Latin, an Italic tongue that was spread across Europe by the Roman empire. Celtic tribes have been associated with Urnfield culture artefacts that began to appear around 1200 BC in central Europe, with the later Hallstatt culture which started around 800 BC, and also with the La Tène culture of around 450 BC.

Whilst these associations are not doubted here, readers should be cautious about merely accepting these defining labels. Celtic-speaking tribes were not limited to the regions within these material cultures and instead extended well beyond them. On the other hand, the Hallstatt material culture was also found in the Illyrian area of Eastern Europe, showing a wide range of settlement.

Movement of this group appears to have been almost exactly west from the ancestral homelands, with some bending of their path due to geography. A serious question would be why they came west. Were they pushed by other nomads, and if so, who? Peoples in the area might have been Iranian nomads or perhaps Thracians, such as the Cimmerians who originated on the steppes before moving south into Iran and Anatolia.

West-South-West IEs

Albanian appears to be an Indo-European dialect isolate. Its affinities appear to make no sense whatsoever, so the less said here about it the better. Any help in this area would be appreciated, so please get in touch. Whoever or whatever they were and are, they occupy the western coast just north of the Greeks.

South-West IEs

This language group seems to include both Greeks and Armenians; whether they split off from a more recent common ancestor than PIE, or were in close contact is debatable.

Also in this area were the Thracians, but their origin is even more debatable because they appear to have spoken a satem language rather than the centum one of their neighbours. A tidy assignment of their origin is impossible due to the uncertainty of their history. Were they a West IE people, perhaps Italics or Illyrians, who were taken over by an eastern, satem-speaking military elite, with their languages subsequently fusing? Also tentatively placed in this group are Dacians and Phrygians.

The 'Mask of Agamemnon' was so named by Heinrich Schliemann, perhaps optimistically, but this is a prime example of Mycenaean work — descendants of South-West IEs

South IEs

These are the Anatolian languages, the first to split off from PIE. The best known is Hittite, which also included Luwian, Palaic, Lydian, and Lycian. This is the group that appears to have abandoned the steppes at the earliest date, and yet historical records indicate that they had the same highly mobile horse-borne habits as the other Indo-Europeans. They fought from chariots and attacked south from Anatolia into Mesopotamia and Egypt.

Easternmost IEs

The Tocharians appear to have a very odd history. Their language shows elements of both eastern and western influences, which raises the question of whether they began as a Western IE group (or a conquering core of Western IE warriors) that went eastwards and either assimilated another tribe or other tribes, or were in heavy contact with them. A case could even be made for them being an Anatolian language group or being in heavy contact with the Anatolian group.

An intriguing possibility is that they are a hybrid people made up of elements of multiple groups. The curious thing about Tocharian is that it is a centum language — just like IE languages in the west — but it is the easternmost of the IE languages.

This is the centum/satem split.

So this gives us two possibilities: either the satem (eastern) pronunciation was adopted in the old homeland of Indo-Europeans after the mass departure of peoples to the west into Europe who became Celts and Germans, and to the far east by the proto-Tocharians; or the centum/satem split is a west/east split and the west-speaking Tocharians performed a u-turn.

The former seems to be the prevailing argument currently. However, the latter is favoured here because Anatolian was the first group to detach itself from the main core of Indo-Europeans and this seems to be a satem group.

This would mean that PIE was originally satem. What is certain is that Tocharians did borrow heavily from other languages because we find Sanskrit words they adopted due to their Buddhist religion. Could Tocharian be heavily hybridised in the manner of English with its large French vocabulary, and religious-adopted Latin vocabulary?

A website named The United Sites of Indo-Europeans (see links) says:

• This group is perhaps the least studied in all [of the] Indo-European macro-family. It consists of two dead languages, Tocharian A (or Agnean) and Tocharian B (or Kuchanian), spoken in the first millennium AD in East Turkestan, in several [oases in which] inscriptions and texts written in [these languages] were found.
• The [routes and methods used in] Tocharic migrations from [the] Middle East to East Asia are still unknown. The languages show many borrowings from early Iranian languages, archaic Finno-Ugric, and even Tibetan-like forms, but the structure itself shows much similarity first of all with Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages. Linguists think Tocharians moved through Central Asia from west to east and, on their way, had many linguistic contacts reflected in their tongue. Before these migrations, [it] being a dialect in [the] proto-Indo-European community, Tocharians must have communicated closely with future Anatolians and Italo-Celts.[4]

East (Homeland) IEs

What in the past were called Aryans are now known as Indo-Iranians and Indo-Aryans — the original term has bad connotations due to its use by the Nazis.

They appear to have been the group that remained where they were in the old homeland, in the steppes to the north of the Caucasus. They also appear to have stayed longer than any ancient group in the 'secondary homeland' to the north of the Black Sea, which is just west of their primary homeland in the upper Caucasus.

There is some evidence in names to show that people using a language which was related to Vedic and Avesta lived to the north of the Black Sea; and various groups of Iranian nomads also occupied that area for a very long time.

The group split into two related linguistic groups, one we call Iranian, and the other Indian; both appear to have lived to the north of the Black Sea (some of the people in this region were known in classical antiquity as Scythians and Sarmatians). In addition to the steppes they expanded into modern Afghanistan, Iran, India, Pakistan, and the hill country of Syria and eastern Turkey.

Along the way they integrated themselves into the Oxus civilisation of around 2200-1700 BC and were probably also responsible for the 'spiral cities' of the Kazakhstan steppe. It seems more likely that 'integrated' is correct rather than 'founded'. IE nomads did not apparently build cities; they conquered or infiltrated into a material culture that itself built cities. The Oxus civilisation people (indigenes, meaning the original natives of that area, equating to aborigines) were probably in conflict (at war) with the IEs of the Andronovo horizon. In time they probably did become IEs due to IE settlement amongst them, but this would have been in the manner of Greece being occupied by the proto-Mycenaeans: the language may have changed but the gene pool would have remained mostly indigene.

As nomads they were quite mobile, ranging as far as China in the east where they were known as eastern Saka (Scythians), to Spain in the west where they were known as Alans (the word is an altered form of Arya).

Some of these Alans accompanied the Vandals into North Africa, settling with them in Tunisia. Their language fragmented into dialects just like all the others, but in this case there is evidence of heavy contact with non-IE languages, particularly from other nomads. There appears to have been heavy contact between Alans and proto-Bulgarians. For instance, the ruler of the Alans bore the proto-Bulgarian (originally Mongol language) title of 'khan' (see the link for Proto-Bulgarian Runic Inscriptions in the sidebar).

As settled farmers, the Indian group moved into modern Pakistan and India; and the settled Iranians moved into modern Iran, eastern Turkey and nearby areas.

One tribe, or dialect group seem actually to have stayed close to the original homeland, and are today's Ossetians.

Professor Gennady Zdanovich has recently (2010) made fresh discoveries on the modern Kazakhstan steppe of Bronze Age 'spiral' cities which exhibit many signs of having been built and used by Indo-Europeans, having been built around 2000 BC

Bear in mind the fact that the timelines given above are conjectural in most cases; the farther back in time one goes, the fewer written records can be used. By necessity the estimates used above are rough — they may be right or they may be wrong — and in either case exact dates seem impossible to prove beyond doubt.

What seems certain is that the Indo-Europeans started out as a numerically small group, possibly or even probably in some sort of isolation, who then entered the steppes and at some point became nomadic via horse-drawn wheeled vehicles. From that action alone, the Indo-Europeans can be regarded as possibly the first militarily aggressive nomadic people on the Eurasian continent, and certainly the first successful one.

As such they had a terrible advantage over the isolated tribes and organised civilisations that they encountered: they could appear out of apparently nowhere and attack, and if they didn't win could simply roll away in their chariots and carts, out of reach of sedentary peoples to attack again somewhere else or later at the same spot. Not until other nomads such as Huns and Mongols developed and expanded was this advantage duplicated. The Indo-Europeans had mixed success in Asia; but in Europe, with no steppes, they took almost everything they encountered.

Indo-Europeans remained militarily aggressive and eventually controlled most of the planet, which was only partially rolled back in modern times as other peoples acquired advanced military and industrial technology. Their contribution to worldwide civilisation has been considerable.

Online Sources

Proto-Bulgarian Runic Inscriptions:
http://www.kroraina.com/pb_lang/pbl_2_4.html

Studies in the History and Language of the Sarmatians:
http://www.kroraina.com/sarm/jh/jh3_4.html

Linguistics Research Center, University of Texas at Austin:
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/general/IE.html

Indo-European Chronology — Countries and Peoples
http://tied.verbix.com/project/chron/chronn.html

Indo-European Etymological Dictionary (J Pokorny):
http://dnghu.org/indoeuropean.html

Distribution of the Indo-Iranian languages

The common ancestor of all of the languages in this family is called Proto-Indo-Iranian — also known as Common Aryan — which was spoken in approximately the late 3rd millennium BC. The three branches of the modern Indo-Iranian languages are Indo-Aryan, Iranian, and Nuristani. Additionally, sometimes a fourth independent branch, Dardic, is posited, but recent scholarship in general places Dardic languages as archaic members of the Indo-Aryan branch.

The common proto-language of the Indo-Iranian languages is Proto-Indo-Iranian, which has been reconstructed.

The oldest attested Indo-Iranian languages are Vedic Sanskrit (ancient Indo-Aryan), Older and Younger Avestan and Old Persian (ancient Iranian languages). A few words from another Indo-Aryan language (see Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni) are attested in documents from the ancient Mitanni and Hittite kingdoms in the Near East.

Overview of the Kurgan hypothesis
Cultures that Gimbutas considered as part of the "Kurgan culture": Bug–Dniester (6th millennium) Samara (5th millennium) Khvalynsk (5th millennium) Dnieper–Donets (5th to 4th millennia) Sredny Stog (mid-5th to mid-4th millennia) Maikop–Dereivka (mid-4th to mid-3rd millennia) Yamnaya (Pit Grave): This is itself a varied cultural horizon, spanning the entire Pontic–Caspian steppe from the mid-4th to the 3rd millennium. Usatovo culture (late 4th millennium)

Cultural horizon

Gimbutas defined and introduced the term "Kurgan culture" in 1956 with the intention of introducing a "broader term" that would combine Sredny Stog II, Pit Grave, and Corded ware horizons (spanning the 4th to 3rd millennia in much of Eastern and Northern Europe). The model of a "Kurgan culture" brings together the various cultures of the Copper Age to Early Bronze Age (5th to 3rd millennia BC) Pontic–Caspian steppe to justify their identification as a single archaeological culture or cultural horizon, based on similarities among them. The eponymous construction of kurgans (mound graves) is only one among several factors. As always in the grouping of archaeological cultures, the dividing line between one culture and the next cannot be drawn with hard precision and will be open to debate.

Stages of culture and expansion

Gimbutas's original suggestion identifies four successive stages of the Kurgan culture:

• Kurgan I, Dnieper/Volga region, earlier half of the 4th millennium BC. Apparently evolving from cultures of the Volga basin, subgroups include the Samara and Seroglazovo cultures.
• Kurgan II–III, latter half of the 4th millennium BC. Includes the Sredny Stog culture and the Maykop culture of the northern Caucasus. Stone circles, anthropomorphic stone stelae of deities.
• Kurgan IV or Pit Grave culture, first half of the 3rd millennium BC, encompassing the entire steppe region from the Ural to Romania.

In other publications she proposes three successive "waves" of expansion:

• Wave 1, predating Kurgan I, expansion from the lower Volga to the Dnieper, leading to coexistence of Kurgan I and the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture. Repercussions of the migrations extend as far as the Balkans and along the Danube to the Vinča culture in Serbia and Lengyel culture in Hungary.
• Wave 2, mid 4th millennium BC, originating in the Maykop culture and resulting in advances of "kurganized" hybrid cultures into northern Europe around 3000 BC (Globular Amphora culture, Baden culture, and ultimately Corded Ware culture). According to Gimbutas this corresponds to the first intrusion of Indo-European languages into western and northern Europe.
• Wave 3, 3000–2800 BC, expansion of the Pit Grave culture beyond the steppes, with the appearance of the characteristic pit graves as far as the areas of modern Romania, Bulgaria, eastern Hungary and Georgia, coincident with the end of the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture and Trialeti culture in Georgia (c. 2750 BC).

The framework of PCT is laid out by Alinei in four main assumptions:

1. Continuity is the basic pattern of European prehistory and the basic working hypothesis on the origins of IE languages.
2. Stability and antiquity are general features of languages.
3. The lexicon of natural languages, due to its antiquity, may be "periodized" along the entire course of human evolution.
4. Archaeological frontiers coincide with linguistic frontiers.

The continuity theory draws on a Continuity Model (CM), positing the presence of IE and non-IE peoples and languages in Europe from Paleolithic times and allowing for minor invasions and infiltrations of local scope, mainly during the last three millennia.

Arguing that continuity is "the archeologist's easiest pursuit," Alinei deems this "the easiest working hypothesis," putting the burden of proof on competing hypotheses as long as none provide irrefutable counter-evidence. Alinei also claims linguistic coherence, rigor and productivity in the pursuit of this approach.

Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic languages.

The Finno-Ugric peoples are any of several peoples of North-West Eurasia who speak languages of the Finno-Ugric group of the Uralic language family, such as the Khanty, Mansi, Hungarians, Maris, Mordvins, Sámi, Estonians, Karelians, Finns, Udmurts, and Komis.

The four most numerous Finno-Ugric peoples are the Hungarians (13-14 million), Finns (6-7 million), Estonians (1.1 million) and Mordvins (744,000). The first three of these have their own independent states – Hungary, Finland, and Estonia. The traditional area of the indigenous Sami people is in Northern Fenno-Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula in Northwest Russia and is known as Sápmi.

Some other Finno-Ugric peoples have autonomous republics in Russia: Karelians (Republic of Karelia), Komi (Komi Republic), Udmurts (Udmurt Republic), Mari (Mari El Republic), and Mordvins (Moksha and Erzya; Republic of Mordovia).

Khanty and Mansi peoples live in Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug of Russia. Komi subgroup Komi-Permyaks used to live in Komi-Permyak Autonomous Okrug, but today this area is a territory with special status within Perm Krai.