Humans speak nearly 7,000 different languages, grouped into about 140 language families. But just five of those families are used by most people around the world. The largest among them is Indo-European, which includes many well-known languages such as English, Spanish, Hindi, Russian, and French.
Nearly half the world’s people speak a language from this group. It covers a wide area—from the Americas all the way to parts of Asia. It may be surprising that people in places like Colombia, India, Iceland, and Greece speak languages from the same family. Experts say this language family likely began in one place before spreading over thousands of years.
Writer Laura Spinney and archaeologist James Mallory have studied how this spread happened. They explored where Indo-European languages may have started and how they reached so many different countries. Linguist Lorna Gibb also looked at language growth but warns that many smaller languages are now at risk of disappearing.
The search for a language’s first home
For over 300 years, scholars have tried to figure out where Indo-European languages began. Some believed they started in the Arctic or the Pacific. Most of these ideas were dismissed over time.
In 1786, British judge William Jones noticed something important. He saw that languages like Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek shared many similar words. For example, the word for “mother” was alike in all three languages. He guessed that these languages came from one older, lost language, later called Indo-European.
In the early 1800s, a scientist named Thomas Young suggested that this language might have started in Central Asia. Some later believed the Indus Valley—one of the oldest human civilizations—might be the birthplace. But its writing has never been clearly understood. Because of that, most experts do not support this theory today.
Indo-European language distrbution. Credit: Original map: Industrius / Derivate: Radoslaw Botev / CC BY SA 2.0
DNA clues point to the Eurasian grasslands
By the 1900s, new ideas about the origin of Indo-European languages appeared. Some people thought the languages began in Northern Europe, but these views were often linked to political beliefs, including those later used by Nazi Germany.
Later, scientists looked more closely at the Pontic–Caspian Steppe. This is a flat region north of the Black and Caspian Seas. In 2015, a major genetic study helped confirm this idea. Researchers studied ancient human remains from this area. They found that people from the Yamnaya culture moved both east and west about 5,000 years ago.
These people didn’t just bring their ways of speaking—they also brought their genes. In some parts of Europe, they replaced almost 90% of the local population. Their impact can still be seen today, as many men in Europe and parts of Asia carry DNA passed down from the Yamnaya.
But the Yamnaya’s own language was never written down, and was lost to time.
Colonization and the spread of the Indo-European languages
Beyond Europe and Asia, the incredible extent of the Indo-European languages is mostly due to the European colonization, with Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, Russian and Dutch settlers spreading it accross the Americas, Africa and Oceania.
While many inhabitants of the Americas have Native, African and even Asian backgrounds, most of them speak an Indo-European language. In Africa, centuries of colonization and trade have imposed European languages on the local states and populations. Even though some countries have started to get rid of this linguistic legacy, languages like French, English, Portuguese and Spanish remain widely spoken by locals.
In Asia, the Russians have contributed to the spread of Indo-European languages. North of the language family historical region (Iran, Northern India), Russian colonization of Siberia and later Central Asia has deeply impacted the local linguistic landscape. In addition to Russian or Slavic settlers, Russia and the USSR have imposed Russian to local Turkic, Mongolic populations, which still learn and practice it to this day.
Lost voices and the risk of language extinction
While Indo-European languages remain strong, smaller languages are in danger. Lorna Gibb explains how and why they disappear. In Namibia, for example, English became the main official language in 1990. At that time, less than 1% of people spoke it. Today, only a few don’t. Many local languages have been pushed aside because of this decision.
Australia, mostly populated by the descendants of European settlers, has also lost many Indigenous languages. In India, the number of endangered languages has grown quickly to 600 according to the UNESCO.
When a language disappears, it often takes local knowledge with it. In a recent study, researchers found over 12,000 plants with names in only one language. These plants are used to treat health problems like heart disease and mental illness. If the language dies, the knowledge might vanish too—even if the plants still exist.
Still, there is hope. Some rare languages are being taught again. Manchu is being studied in China. Māori is now an official language in New Zealand. Gaelic, a Celtic language, is making a comeback in Scotland. Even special whistle-based languages, once used to speak across valleys and hills, are being protected, like in Spain’s Canary Islands.