As a historical linguist, one of the most common questions I've been asked is if, ultimately, all of those languages trace back to a common origin. Or, perhaps, did disparate groups develop spoken language independently, so there is no single "pre-Tower-of-Babel" language (if I can swipe a metaphor from the Bible)? The honest answer is "we don't know." Determining the relationships between languages -- their common ancestry, as it were -- is tricky business, and relies on more than chance similarity between a few words. My own area of research was borrow words in Old English and Old Gaelic (mostly from Old Norse), a phenomenon that significantly complicates matters. English has an unfortunate habit of appropriating words from other languages -- a selective list of English vocabulary could easily lead the incautious to the incorrect conclusion that it originated from Latin, for example. (In the preceding sentence, the words unfortunate, habit, appropriating, language, selective, vocabulary, incautious, incorrect, conclusion, originated, and example all come directly from Latin. As do preceding, sentence, and directly. So none of those are original to English -- they were adopted by scholars and clerics between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries C.E.)
As you might expect, the longer two languages have been separate, the further they diverge, not only because they borrow words from (different) neighboring languages but because of random changes in pronunciation and syntax. There's a good analogy here to biological evolution; the process is much like the effect that mutations have in evolution. Closely-related species have very similar DNA; extremely distantly-related ones, like humans and apple trees, have very few common genes, and it's taken a great deal of detailed analysis to show that all life forms do have a single common ancestor.
That feat has not yet been accomplished with language evolution. Finnish and Swahili may have a common ancestor, but if so, they've been separate for so long that all traces of that relationship have been erased over time.
Even with groups of languages with a more recent common ancestor, it can remarkably difficult to piece together what their relationship is. For Indo-European languages, surely the most studied group of languages in the world, we're still trying to figure out their family tree, and aligning it with what is known from history and archaeology. This was the subject of a study out of the University of Copenhagen that was published last week, and looked at trying to reconcile the language groups in southern and western Europe with what we now know from genetic studies of ancient bones and teeth.
[Nota bene: the Germanic and Slavic peoples were not part of this study; the current model suggests that
Germanic groups are allied to the neolithic northern Corded Ware and Funnelbeaker Cultures, which appear to have originated in the steppes of what are now western Russia and Ukraine; the Slavs came in much later, probably from the region between the Danube River and the Black Sea.]
The study found a genetic correlation between speakers of the Italo-Celtic language cluster (Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, and Romanian; Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Cornish, Breton, and Welsh) and one between speakers of the Greco-Armenian cluster (Greek, Cypriot, Albanian, and Armenian). The southern branch of the Corded Ware culture seems to have undergone two influxes from the east -- one from the Bell Beaker Culture, starting in around 2800 B.C.E. (so called because of the characteristically bell-shaped ceramic drinking vessels found at their settlement sites), which ended up migrating all the way to the Iberian Peninsula, and the other from the Yamnaya, which came from the Pontic steppe but never got past what is now Switzerland and eastern Italy (most of them didn't even get that far).
It's tempting to overconclude from this; just like my earlier example of Latin borrow words in English, the genetic correlation between the Italo-Celtic and Greco-Armenian regions doesn't mean that the differences we see in those two branches of the Indo-European language family come from the Bell Beaker people and the Yamnaya, respectively. The lack of early written records for most of these languages means that we don't have a good "fossil record" of how and when they evolved.
But the current study provides some tantalizing clues about how migration of speakers of (presumably) two different dialects of Proto-Indo-European may have influenced the evolution of the western and eastern branches of today's Indo-European languages.
So it's one step toward finding the common roots of (most) European languages. Even if we may never settle the question of how they're related for certain, it's cool that they're using the techniques of modern genetics to find out about where our distant ancestors came from -- and what languages they may have spoken.
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