PARIS: The vast group of languages that dominates Europe and much of Central and South Asia originated around 8,000 years ago among farmers in what is now Anatolia, Turkey.

So say a pair of New Zealand academics who have remarkably retraced the family tree of so-called Indo-European languages — a linguistic classification that covers scores of tongues ranging from Faroese to Hindi by way of English, French, German, Gujarati, Nepalese and Russian.

Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson, psychologists at the University of Auckland, built their language tree on the same principles as the theory of genetic evolution.

According to this idea, words, like genes, survive according to their fitness.

Imported words take root in a language in response to evolutionary pressures or if they answer a need, and words can also fall out of use, rather like “silent” DNA that appears to be a relic in the genome and serves no known purpose.

The languages that are spoken and written today are the result of historical layering, of addition and deletion, that can be carefully scraped away to trace their previous sources, Gray and Atkinson suggest in the British weekly scientific journal Nature.

The similarity is phylogeny — the reconstruction of the evolutionary history of organisms.

In theory, an evolutionary biologist one can work all the way back to LUCA: the “last universal common ancestor”, presumed to be a bacterium, which evolved into all life as we know it today.

Using a parallel method, Gray and Atkinson turned back the clock on 87 languages, using sophisticated software to trace the path taken by 2,449 “cognates” — fundamental words in each language that are presumed to derive from a common ancestor.

Their study produces an estimated age-range for the very first Indo-European language of between 7,800 and 9,800 years ago, among rural communities who lived in modern-day Anatolia and for whom there is already an impressive array of archaeological evidence.

Successful pioneers in agriculture, these people migrated westwards and eastwards and the languages evolved accordingly, becoming the tongues that today are so diverse that they would seem to share no common link.—AFP