Linguists have made a "significant breakthrough" regarding the origin of Indo-European languages. The linguists say the origins go back more than 8,100 years. Their study may settle a 200-year-old dispute over where English came from. One school of thought says it has its roots on the northern shore of the Black Sea. A competing theory is that English originated from Anatolia (present-day Turkey) 9,000 years ago.
Nearly half the world speaks Indo-European languages. The most commonly spoken are English, Hindi, Urdu, Spanish and Bengali. Each of these have over 100 million native speakers. Linguists created a databank of core vocabulary from 161 Indo-European languages. They concluded that their analysis suggested that the answer to the 200-year-old Indo-European enigma is a hybrid of the Steppe and Anatolia theories.
Try the same news story at these levels:
Languages - Level 5 or Languages - Level 6
Sources- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/english-sanskrit-common-ancestor-language-b2383469.html
- https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-07-28/indo-european-dialects-dispersed-across-eurasia-in-successive-waves-over-the-course-of-8000-years.html
- https://www.newscientist.com/article/2385057-origin-of-indo-european-languages-traced-back-to-8000-years-ago/
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