Can the family tree of the world’s languages be traced back to a single ancestor? It’s no surprise that Dutch, Danish, and German are part of a single language group and share a common ancestor language. Romanian, Portuguese, and French descend from Latin. This understanding of language genealogy is common.
The work of historical linguistics over the last several centuries has yielded several detailed family trees, each of which shows the relationships between some of the world’s currently-existing languages. Dutch, Danish, and German arise from one earlier language, and together with Norwegian, Flemish, Icelandic, and others, form a sibling group: the parent language which gave birth to all of them no longer exists, but can be reconstructed.
The patterns found in the contemporary languages give clues about the structures of the parent language. Working backward, linguists can discover the features of the now-extinct parent. In the case of German, Swedish, Dutch, etc., the original source language is called “Germanic” (not German!) or sometimes “proto-Germanic.”
Likewise, a proto-Italic language gave birth to Latin; Latin in turn produced Spanish, Italian, etc. A proto-Slavic language yielded Polish, Russian, Czech, Slovak, etc.
Moving a generation further into the past, linguists then sought a common ancestor for the Germanic, Slavic, and Italic families. Those three — together with a few others, like Celtic, Hellenic, and Indo-Iranian — are all the progeny of an original “Indo-European” language. This language would have been spoken up to around 2500 B.C., and perhaps even written, although no written evidence has been discovered.
As research moves back generation by generation, the postulation of these various ancestor languages is based on ever more indirect evidence. It is tenuous to reconstruct a language for which no written traces exist, and which has not been spoken or used for centuries or even millennia. Data is derived from the common features of the existing daughter languages.
It is even more shaky to reconstruct a mother language when the evidence is a collection of hypothetical languages which are themselves reconstructions.
The move from examining the vocabulary and grammar of Gothic and Old Icelandic to reconstructing a proto-Germanic language is at least justified by concrete examples from the daughter languages. But the move to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European is even more fragile, because the daughter languages themselves are hypothetical reconstructions.
Yet linguists have done precisely this.
So there is now a detailed account of the proto-Indo-European language, its daughter languages, granddaughter languages, and great-granddaughter languages. As the name ‘Indo-European’ suggests, the family includes many of the languages which are now spoken in a broad area from India to Europe. Sanskrit and English turn out to be cousins.
This same multi-generational family tree structure has been documented for other language groups — an Afro-Asiatic group, a Dravidian group, a Kartvelian group, and others. Eventually, any existing language is seen as part of a larger linguistic family.
The final step — a speculative and controversial step — is to show all these groups, in their earliest phases, as siblings, and to posit a single language as the ancestor of all known human speech. The ultimate source is called ‘proto-World’ or ‘proto-Human’ or ‘proto-Sapiens’ and corresponds to an intuitive understanding of human language. It is conjectured to have been common during the Paleolithic era.
The ‘proto-World’ hypothesis engenders both love and hate among linguists — those who do research in historical linguistics are also called ‘philologists’ — because it has only the most uncertain indirect evidence, and yet also seems to be probably correct. The response of many linguists is that it is likely to be true and likely never to be proven.
One step in the process of developing the proto-World hypothesis was the discovery — or invention, depending on how you view it — of the Nostratic language group. This super-family of languages includes the Indo-European group, as well as the Uralic and Altaic groups, and potentially other groups. The Nostratic macrofamily does not, however, include all languages. It is an intermediate stage of development between proto-World and Indo-European.
Among linguists, there are two extreme views: on the one hand, a confident assertion that proto-World and Nostratic had a concrete existence, were part of a clearly definable family tree of languages, and are properly the object of rigorous academic study and attempted reconstruction; on the other hand, a rejection of proto-World and Nostratic as purely speculative and conjectural, lacking any observable evidence, and not properly the object of academic investigation.
Given those two extreme positions, fiery and entertaining debate is guaranteed. There are, of course, many moderate scholars who see proto-World and Nostratic as reasonable hypotheses, but as lacking enough detailed evidence to fuel rigorous reconstruction.
One linguist in the Nostratic camp is Vitaly Shevoroshkin; author Robert Wright gives a glimpse of Shevoroshkin’s work:
The assertion that proto-Nostratic actually existed, though sufficient to inflame a number of American linguists, is innocuous compared with the second part of Shevoroshkin’s world view: the Nostratic phylum is itself historically related to the handful of other great language families Shevoroshkin sees in the world, which means that all of them are descended from a common tongue. This language — called, variously, proto-Human, proto-World, and the Mother Tongue — would have been spoken 50,000, 100,000, maybe even 150,000 years ago, probably in Africa, and then diffused across the globe. And here’s the kicker, the thing that gives Shevoroshkin a rock-solid basis for his bunker mentality: he believes not only that proto-World’s past existence is apparent but that proto-World itself is apparent, its primordial elements distinctly visible in modern languages, as refracted through eons of linguistic evolution. He says we can now begin reconstructing proto-World, the basic vocabulary from which all the world’s known languages have sprung.
While detailed descriptions of how, e.g., Old High German emerged from proto-Germanic have been thoroughly explored, and accounts of them ossified in a couple centuries’ worth of academic work, the details of Nostratic and proto-World are murky and research is ongoing. This will provide employment and heated debate among scholars for another century or two.
