The DNA of human languages
Over time, the family tree of European languages was built, a large family made up of those that are historically related, but which connects us directly with people from India and Pakistan.
Surely, at some point in your life, you have been told that Catalan and Castilian are Romance languages, which belong to the same family. What does it mean, however, that they are part of the same language family? We've heard about language families since we were in high school. Traditionally, we're told that we belong to the Romance family, because Catalan comes from Latin, like so many other languages.
The work of many linguists focuses on discovering the kinship between the world's different languages. If someone mentions the Brothers Grimm (Jacob and Wilhelm), most of us will think of fairy tales, folk tales, and legends. While Wilhelm was more interested in medieval literature, Jacob specialized in Germanic lexicography and mythology. When observing various languages, there were fears of systematic changes. Together with Karl Verner, Jacob Grimm proposed a series of phonetic laws that explained how languages had changed. From here, linguists interested in the evolution of languages made a major breakthrough. They were able to go back in time and see that Latin and Greek are not so distantly related, and that these two languages were also related to Germanic languages (Frisian, Swedish, German, etc.), even Slavic languages (Russian, Czech, Polish, etc.) and Celtic languages (Breton, Welsh, etc.).
Over time, the family tree of European languages was built up. A large family of historically related languages. It's the map that usually appears in textbooks, which highlights the famous exceptions: Hungarian, Finnish, Saami (or Lappish), and Estonian (they are from a family called Finno-Ugric, which comes from behind the Ural Mountains) and Basque, the eternal language isolate that for the moment doesn't seem to have that it is the language that Caesar encountered when he entered Gaul, but little else; there have been many proposals, but all of them have been refuted).
A family of 400 languages
The family map expanded when Europeans learned about Sanskrit, a language from India, which helped them connect a large group of languages from across Asia. These studies helped resolve questions such as the origin of Romani, the language of the Gypsies, establishing its connection to the languages of Iran and India. This large family of more than 400 languages is called Indo-European.
The term "family" is used metaphorically, as the family trees of language families mimic the family trees of individuals. But in fact, there is a whole aspect that goes beyond metaphor and directly connects us to the people of Iran and Pakistan. Geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza has studied population genetics for years and has always taken family trees very seriously. His book... Genes, peoples and languages It's a fantastic summary of his work. Cavalli-Sforza has analyzed multiple DNA sequences from a multitude of populations. The main result has been the creation of population trees, which show how populations have diverged throughout history. He has also compared these trees with language trees, and the degree of agreement between the two is astonishing.
As populations diverge, so do languages. This isn't entirely unexpected and is logical enough. There will always be aspects to improve, or mysteries to solve, but finding such a close overlap has also helped to refine or rethink certain ideas assumed by linguistics. It's important to keep in mind that languages evolve or change long before DNA, which is why it sometimes seems like there are missing links in the chain.
There are also languages that disappear without a trace, or populations that seem more disconnected from the others. Recently, a study led by David Reich of Harvard University has been able to find a link, until then invisible, that connects the populations of Anatolia (present-day Turkey) with the steppe culture of the Yamnaya, famous for its expansion throughout Europe and Asia and for being the precursors of many of the Indo-European languages.
The Indo-Europeans
The Indo-European language map has remained virtually unchanged until very recently. Elements have occasionally been moved within the scheme, but without major changes. But in 2023, archaeologist Daniel Schwemer of Julius-Maximilians-Universität (Würzburg, Germany) announced that, by analyzing Hittite clay tablets, he had discovered a new language that had never been recorded before. The Hittites were interested in collecting ritual samples in foreign languages. For this reason, the original language was transcribed onto the clay tablet. The decipherment of the cuneiform script (so called because it was made by marking the still-fresh clay with a wooden stamp) has brought this unknown language to light thousands of years later.
The study of languages helps us better understand our history and our ties to the multitude of cultures around us. This includes ancient languages, such as Latin and Greek. Without studying them, we can't understand where we come from. And it also includes modern languages: from the most well-known, like German, to lesser-known ones, like Scottish Gaelic, the Sorbian spoken in Saxony and Brandenburg, and the Romance language spoken in Switzerland, among others.
There is still much to discover, but the combination of different disciplines such as linguistics, anthropology, and genetics will surely help us solve many of these mysteries.
