Skip to footer

Birthplace of most European and West Asian languages traced to Turkey

Using methods borrowed from epidemiology, researchers have identified Anatolia, a peninsula that is now part of Turkey, as the origin of the major language families of Europe and West Asia.

|
olly | shutterstock
Indo-European languages – a category that includes most of the major languages of Europe and western Asia – originated in what is now Turkey, between 8,000 and 9,500 years ago, say researchers.

English is one member of a large family, the Indo-European languages, that are now spoken by a huge swath of the world. But where they originated is the subject of controversy, with experts undecided between two areas of western Asia.

Borrowing a technique used to reconstruct family trees for viruses, an international research team has come down squarely on one side of the debate: Indo-European languages originated in Anatolia, a southwestern Asian peninsula that is now part of Turkey, between 8,000 and 9,500 years ago, and were carried, at least in part, by the spread of agriculture.

Other researchers maintain that Indo-European languages originated in the steppes north of the Caspian and Black seas 6,000 years ago and were spread by the semi-nomadic Kurgan people.

"These two theories have two different ages and homelands, and by tracing back in time using these methods to study viral outbreaks, we are able to test between the theories," Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand said in an audio interview released by the journal Science, in which the new research appears.

Instead of constructing a family tree by comparing the DNA of viruses, Atkinson and colleagues compared what are known as cognates, or words in different languages with the same origin. For instance, the English "mother" and the Spanish "madre" are cognates. [Original Language Sounded Like Yoda]

The researchers included about 20 extinct languages in their sample of 100 Indo-European languages; some of these extinct languages, such as Hittite, were spoken more than 3,000 years ago. These ancient languages helped the team look further back in time.

They looked to historical events, such as the breakup of the Roman Empire's language Latin into the Romance languages, to establish a time scale for the evolution of the Indo-European languages. 

They then used a statistical method to focus in on the family trees that best explained their data. The result strongly favors the Anatolian hypothesis, Atkinson said.

The spread of agriculture, either as new generations of farmers sought out new land or through the conversion of hunter-gatherers, was a mechanism that would explain the expansive spread of the languages in this family, according to the researchers, but they added that agriculture was probably not the sole driver of language spread.  

The research is detailed in Friday's (Aug. 24) issue of the journal Science.

Follow Wynne Parry on Twitter @Wynne_Parry or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

Copyright 2012 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Birthplace of most European and West Asian languages traced to Turkey
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0824/Birthplace-of-most-European-and-West-Asian-languages-traced-to-Turkey
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe