PIE Is the Only Proto-Language

Rasmus Grimm & Jacob Rask

Indo-European is perhaps the best-studied among the language families of humanity; indeed, it was the “discovery” of Proto-Indo-European that launched, and gradually refined, the very methods by which language history is now studied. The catalog of the surviving descendants of PIE includes these subfamilies:

• Albanian
• Armenian
• Balto-Slavic
• Celtic
• Germanic
• Hellenic
• Indo-Iranian
• Italic

The geographic distribution of these 8 sub-families (after lots of colonial expansion but not the most recent wave) has been helpfully diagrammed like this:

Indo-European Language Family Branches in Eurasia, by Bill Williams, CC BY-SA 4.0

As elegant as this multicolored display may be, it does not tell the full story. There is an additional group of descendants of PIE, all of which are considered to now be “extinct”. This list is as follows:

• †Anatolian
• †Dacian
• †Illyrian
• †Liburnian
• †Lusitanian
• †Messapic
• †Phrygian
• †Thracian
• †Tocharian
• †Paeonian

The observer cannot help being struck by the observation that the number of extinct subfamilies (10) exceeds that of the number of surviving families (8), and by a considerable margin (20% or 25%, depending on which status you privilege when doing the calculation).

Previous work has attempted to account for this state of affairs by positing that those families which disappeared suffered a somehow “deserved” fate. Analysts have often assumed that the now-extinct languages were somehow less functionally adequate than those which survived; perhaps they lacked vocabulary for cultural innovations (such as the chariot), or perhaps commands given in those languages were unintelligible to horses.¹

Such explanations may have a grain of truth, but they leave unexamined some major questions which we feel deserve answers. An important one is this: it can be easily observed that PIE descendant languages tend to occupy distinct, non-overlapping territories; where were the analogous (and non-overlapping) territories inhabited by the speakers of the extinct subfamilies?

It is our goal in this paper to answer this question, which has been unaddressed for too long. We find that a novel way of looking at the data yields a considerably more complete account of PIE’s modern status.

In place of the traditional comparison of 8 surviving subfamilies vs. 10 extinct ones, we call the reader’s attention to the surviving families as a percentage of the total number of families: 8/18, or 44.4%.

What is striking about this number is that it is almost precisely the same as the percentage of today’s Homo Sapiens population who speak an Indo-European language as their first language: 46%.

The implications are, of course, enormous. The roughly 54% of earth’s inhabitants who have been claimed not to speak an Indo-European language actually do. Their languages are in fact the supposedly “extinct” PIE descendants, filling the colorless spaces on the map above (including those spaces not shown), with PIE languages everywhere. ²

Proto-Indo-European is not the ancestor of some modern languages—it is the single proto-language that spawned them all.

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