The bulk of the Indo-European languages developed from late PIE, which was spoken at the Yamnaya horizon in the Pontic–Caspian steppe, around 3000 BCE. The second-oldest branch, the Tocharian languages, were spoken in the Tarim Basin (present-day western China), and split-off from early PIE, which was spoken on the eastern Pontic steppe. Recent genetic research has increasingly contributed to understanding of the relations between various prehistoric cultures.Īccording to the widely held Kurgan hypothesis, or renewed Steppe hypothesis, the oldest branch were the Anatolian languages ( Hittite language and Luwian language) which split from the earliest proto-Indo-European speech community (archaic PIE), which itself developed in the Volga basin. Archaeological data traces the spread of cultures presumed to be created by speakers of Proto-Indo-European in several stages: from the hypothesized locations of the Proto-Indo-European homeland, into their later locations of Western Europe, Central, South and Eastern Asia by migrations and by language shift through elite-recruitment as described by anthropological research. Comparative linguistics describes the similarities between various languages and the linguistic laws at play in the changes in those languages (see Indo-European studies).
While there can be no direct evidence of prehistoric languages, both the existence of Proto-Indo-European and the dispersal of its daughter dialects through wide-ranging migrations and elite-dominance dispersal are inferred through a synthesis of data from linguistics, archaeology, anthropology and genetics. The Indo-European migrations were the migrations of Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) speakers, as proposed by contemporary scholarship, and the subsequent migrations of people speaking further developed Indo-European languages, which explains why the Indo-European languages are spoken in a large area in Eurasia, from India and Iran to Europe.
0 kommentar(er)
