New Study Suggests Anatolian Homeland for Indo-Europeans

Everyone knows that Portuguese and Spanish are closely related, with a shared vocabulary as high as 80%. Most people also know that both languages are part of the Romance language family, which also includes Italian, French, and Rumanian.  

But did you know that these languages are also related to languages as diverse as Welsh, Russian, English, Hindi, and Persian?  All of these languages, and many more, are part of a huge language family known as Indo-European.  Indo-European languages are the dominant languages in Europe, North and South America, Australia, as well as areas of western Asia. Indo-European languages are common second languages in many parts of Africa and Asia, a result of the old European colonial empires. 

This map shows how widespread Indo-European languages are. Areas in red show where Indo-European languages are spoken as the primary language:

The relationship among Indo-European languages has been clear for some time, with obvious similarities between number words, words used for family members, pronouns, and other frequently used words. In 1786, Sir William James delivered a lecture on the similarities between Sanskrit, Latin, Ancient Greek, Gothic, Celtic, and Old Persian. 

This map, from "O Globo," shows the striking resemblance of three common words across a wide geographic and cultural spectrum (you will need to click on this graphic, as well as the ones that follow, in order to read it):

More examples:

The pronoun "I" in Russian is "ya," in French, "je," in Portuguese, "eu," in German, "ich", and in Latin, "ego;" the pronoun for "you" (singular familiar) in Russian is "ty," in French, "tu," in Portuguese," "tu," in German, "du," and in Latin, "tu."  

And here's a chart showing the similarities in numbers. Notice that the words for 2, 3, and 10 are almost the same across all the languages.

By applying well-accepted practices of historical linguistics, linguists have reconstructed a fairly complete proto-Indo-European language.  However, experts are divided about where the original speakers of the mother tongue first lived.  

We know that their descendants spread out to cover a huge portion of the world, and those movements are well documented in both ancient and modern history. However, the first Indo-Europeans emerged long before written history was recorded, which makes it much harder to pinpoint their original location.

Several recent articles describe the results of new research about the origin of the first speakers of proto-Indo-European. The newest research has been published by Quentin Atkinson and colleagues at  the University of Auckland in New Zealand.  Their study argues for a homeland in Anatolia, in what is now Turkey.

One article appeared in the New York "Times." It includes a graphic, with a map and a family tree, showing when the daughter languages separated from each other.  The map on the "Times" website is similar to this one:

Another article appeared in the "Scientific American," while a third appeared in "O Globo".