An aerial view of the Ural mountain range in the Orenburg region of western Russia. When early people domesticated horses in this region, it marked a turning point that science journalist Laura ...

The origins of Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral tongue that diverged into hundreds of languages spoken by more than three billion people worldwide, have long been a matter of debate. According to ...

If you have studied almost any European language, you will have noticed words that felt oddly familiar. French mort (dead) recalls English murder. German Hund (dog) is a dead ringer for hound. Czech ...

A new linguistic study sheds light on the nature of languages spoken before the written period, using computational modeling to reconstruct the grammar of the 6500-7000 year-old Proto-Indo-European ...

The diversity of human languages can be likened to branches on a tree. If you’re reading this in English, you’re on a branch that traces back to a common ancestor with Scots, which traces back to a ...

Linguists and archaeologists have argued for decades about where, and when, the first Indo-European languages were spoken, and what kind of lives those first speakers led. A controversial new analytic ...

Proto-Indo-European was last spoken between approximately 4,500 and 2,500 BC by our ancestors from all over Europe and Asia. It is thought to have originated on the steppes to the north of the Caspian ...

CHENNAI: Even Tamil teachers in the state might be taken aback if we told them that the origins of the English word ‘free’ could be traced to Tamil. While etymology links it to the Sanskrit root ‘pri’ ...

MOTHER. There can scarcely be a more emotive word in the English language. We can imagine children howling it as they wake from nightmares, and centenarians whispering it on their death beds. A 2004 ...