5 days ago
How Migration and Soft Power Made Indo-European Languages Dominant
About 5,000 years ago, a group of herders living in the grasslands north of the Black Sea headed west, taking their animals with them. They got as far as the Carpathian Basin — the western extremity of the vast Eurasian steppe centered on modern Hungary — but their descendants pushed farther, and within 1,000 years languages related to those of the original migrants were spoken as far west as Ireland's Atlantic coast.
That is the leading explanation today for how the majority of Europeans came to speak the languages they do. And not just Europeans. At the same time that those intrepid steppe-dwellers set off west, others speaking related dialects headed east, planting their way of speaking in Asia. Both eastern and western dialect clusters share the label 'Indo-European' because, by the time linguists noticed the family resemblance in the 18th century, they were spoken from Europe to the Indian sub-continent.
