This post is pretty much entirely old news that I've blogged about previously. But every once and a while it is worth recapping the basics for folks who are new to the discussion (and quite frankly, I just haven't had the time lately to post in more depth about more up to date developments in this field).
The Indo-European Languages
More than 40% of humans alive today speak an Indo-European language as their mother tongue, some 3.4 billion people (and well north of 50% if you count second-language learners). The top ten are:Spanish ~484 millionEnglish ~390 millionHindi ~345 millionPortuguese ~250 millionBengali ~242 millionRussian ~145 millionPunjabi ~120 millionMarathi ~83 millionUrdu ~78 millionGerman ~76 million
Via Razib Khan
It is also worth noting that the 'Indo" part of "Indo-European", basically, languages derived from Sanskrit (formally known as the Indo-Aryan language family) as it existed ca. 1500 BCE, is a huge part of the total with about 868 million speakers (about 39% of the top ten) among the top ten Indo-European languages, compared to about 1365 million for European languages (including native speakers of versions of those languages spoken mostly in their New World colonies in North America and South America, and in Australia and New Zealand) among the top ten Indo-European languages. There are more Sanskrit derived language speakers in the top ten than there are Latin derived (Romance) language speakers in the top ten.
Where Did The Indo-European Languages Come From?
All Indo-European languages are derived from the Proto-Indo-European language spoken by about 10,000-20,000 people in what is now Ukraine, probably making up several tribes of people with a mixed herder-farmer form of subsistence, around 3000 BCE.
Speculatively, Proto-Indo-European may have arisen from a fusion of the language of an early herder community in the region and an early farmer community in the reegion.
The Indo-European language expansion had a large demic component (i.e. it involved Indo-Europeans people replacing or demographically swamping existing populations), although the extent that this happened varied considerably, from about 90% replacement in the British Isles ca. 2500-2400 BCE, to less than 15% in parts of Southern India (where Indo-European languages are currently not widely spoken in daily life as a first language).
Indo-European Languages In South Asia
In India, the Indo-European demic component in places where Dravidian languages are now the predominant native language, is probably the product of a first wave of Indo-European conquest that covered almost all of the Indian subcontinent and led to the extinction of most of the then existing Dravidian language. This conquest was then followed by a Dravidian reconquest of most of the formerly Dravidian linguistic territory by speakers of a sole surviving Dravidian language in a small area that managed to escape language shift at the hands of the Indo-Aryan conquerors. The reconquest kept the invader's proto-Hindu religion (maintained to this day by members of a broad Brahmin caste called a "varna" in South India, who have significant ancestry from those invaders), however, mostly intact but with regional influences. Subsequent waves of Indo-European people migrated to Northern India after this reconquest, but not to Southern India.
This explains why the last date of mass Indo-European admixture is older in Southern India than in Northern India (which is mostly Indo-European speaking), why the Dravidian language family looks so young despite the fact that the most plausible time for it to emerge is in the South Asian Neolithic Revolution ca. 2500 BCE (not all that different from the Proto-Indo-European language, despite the fact that the Indo-European language family that is far more diverse and has far more time depth), why Indo-European ancestry found across all of India but in varying proportions by location and caste, and why Indo-European language speaking Hindus are much more likely to be vegetarians than Dravidian language speaking Hindus (vegetarianism was one aspect of the invader's religion that didn't survive the Dravidian reconquest).
Their expansion is summarized in broad brush without some of the finer details in the map above, which is generally accurate but subject to revision as new evidence from archaeology and ancient DNA and historical linguistics refines it.
Indo-European Anatolian Languages.
Probably the most controversial part of the map pertains to how the Anatolian Indo-European languages (which are now extinct) relate to the other Indo-European languages.
These languages are greatly diverged from other Indo-European languages (and there is not much Steppe ancestry in ancient DNA from Neolithic and Bronze Age Anatolia), which has led some historical linguists to try to come up with contorted theories to explain what seems like a very old date of divergence of the Anatolian languages from the other Indo-European languages, in the face of genetic evidence, ancient historical records from nearby areas, and archaeology, that don't seem to fit this narrative.
For example, some scholars think that the Indo-European languages originated in Anatolia in the Neolithic era and then had a secondary expansion to almost everywhere else sometime after 3000 BCE. This well-intentioned effort to fit the linguistic distinctiveness of the Anatolian languages to the other evidence is wrong.
In my informed but not credentialed opinion, the Indo-European languages originated on the Steppe, and one wave of Indo-European migrants travelled to Anatolia around 2000 BCE (at a time when Indo-Europeans were rapidly expanding in all directions due to a climate driven collapse of civilizations in Europe and India at the time). The Anatolian languages are more distinct from other Indo-European languages. But this is not because the time depth of their relationship is older.
Instead, it is because unlike most other places that the Indo-European languages expanded to, the local copper age/early Bronze Age civilization in Anatolia has not collapsed to nearly the same extent, so the Anatolian languages spread more through elite dominance than demically, and the Anatolian languages had a stronger substrate influence from the Hattic language spoken in the region before it was conquered by an Indo-European elite in the centuries following 2000 BCE from a couple of modest Indo-European villages, in a process of conquest that is historically attested that ultimately gave rise to a Hittite empire. Most historically attested Indo-European Anatolian languages are known only after the Hittite language fractured after the Hittite Empire collapsed in the regional phenomena known as Bronze Age collapse, ca. 1200 BCE, in a process similar to the fragmentation of the Romance languages after the fall of the Roman Empire. Only two or three of the Anatolian languages (including Hittite) predate this fragmentation.
The Anatolian languages also seem more distinct because the substrate languages for Indo-European languages in Europe were all part of the same Neolithic Paleo-European language family of the first farmers of Europe (who largely replaced early European hunter-gatherers), derived from their common origins in Western Anatolia (before Anatolia experienced a language shift in the Copper Age or early Bronze Age as invaders from the Caucuses and Western Asian highlands conquered its Neolithic civilization).
Some of what looks like shared Indo-European roots in European Indo-European languages is really the product of a shared Paleo-European linguistic substrate that is absent in the Anatolian languages and Tocharian languages (which are the most diverged from other European language causing some linguists to assume that the greater divergence represented greater time depth of the divergence).
The Tocharian language family
Another, less intense controversy in Indo-European historical linguistics is how the extinct Tocharian language family fits into the overall picture.
The Tocharian languages, attested in written form and spoken historically in the Tarim Basin of Central Asia, is the attested Indo-European language family that is probably most conservative with respect to Proto-Indo-European. This is because it experienced far less contact with other languages and had almost no substrate influence as the Tocharians moved into basically unoccupied territory. In the same way and for the same reasons, Icelandic is the most conservative Germanic language, the Spanish of the American Southwest is the most conservative Spanish dialect, and the Appalachian English dialect is closest in pronunciation to Shakespearian English.
In my own life, I've personally seen that the Korean language dialect of Korean migrants to the U.S. is more conservative than that of Koreans who stayed in Korea. Languages evolve most slowly at the frontiers if they have limited language contract with other languages (something that obviously isn't true of second generation and later Korean language speakers in the U.S., of course).
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