Europe and Western Asia: Indo-European linguistic history

Description

In book: Ness E. (Ed.) The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration. Volume I: Prehistory. — Blackwell, 2013. — pp. 157-167.The Indo-European family of languages, as its very name implies, ranks among the most remarkable of all the tales that our speech tells us of our origins, and our migrations. Or rather, half-tells us: for as well as holding many unexpected lessons on our past, Indo-European poses just as many enigmas; and both are all the greater for the sheer scale of this language family.The languages of the world represent a couple of hundred independent lineages (plus many more now extinct), of which just one has somehow come to account for the native speech of almost half of humanity. Indo-European so outranks all other language families in territory and population that the migrations that carried it must likewise have been uncommonly significant in geographical range, at least cumulatively. Whether they were equally so in demographic terms, however, remains one of the enigmas.These diverging migrations go back so far into prehistory that Indo-European has long since ceased to be some monolithic language entity; even millennia ago it was already a collection of scores, now hundreds, of different tongues. These are by now so deeply divergent from each other that few speakers of languages from any of the family’s dozen or so main branches (or ‘sub-families’) are even aware they share the same deep linguistic origin with all the rest. To name but a few, Indo-European languages include French, Russian, Greek, Irish, Persian, Hindi — and English, likewise ultimately related to all the others.