TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Linguists have long agreed that languages from English to Greek to Hindi – which is known as 'Indo-European languages', are the modern descendants of a language family which first emerged from a common ancestor spoken thousands of years ago, Science Daily reported. A latest study by scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, reveals more on when and where it was most likely used.

“This ancestor language originated 5,500 to 6,500 years ago, on the Pontic-Caspian steppe stretching from Moldova and Ukraine to Russia and western Kazakhstan,” the report says as quoted by Science Daily.

The team of scientists consisting of Will Chang, Chundra Cathcart, David Hall and Andrew Garrett wrote their research result into an article entitled ‘Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis’ . This article will be published on the journal of Language on March.

This article provides new support for the "steppe hypothesis" or "Kurgan hypothesis," which proposes that Indo-European languages first spread with cultural developments in animal husbandry around 4500 to 3500 BCE.

Chang and his team examined more than 200 sets of words from active and inactive Indo-European languages. After determining how quickly these words changed over time through statistical modeling, they concluded that the rate of change indicated that the languages which first used these words began to diverge approximately 6,500 years ago, in accordance with the steppe hypothesis.

This is one of the first quantitatively-based academic papers in support of the steppe hypothesis, and the first to use a model with "ancestry constraints" which more directly incorporate previously discovered relationships between languages. In future research, methods from this study could be used to study the origins of other language families, such as Afro-Asiatic and Sino-Tibetan.

MAHARDIKA SATRIA HADI