December 01, 2003, 9:40 AM — Two researchers using computer analysis of 87 past and present languages have concluded that the English language and the Indo-European language family of which it is a part, originated in what is now Turkey around 8,000 years ago.
Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland, used computational methods based on evolutionary biology theory to study two competing theories of the emergence of the Indo-European language family, which includes most mainstream modern European languages, plus Iranian, Sanskrit and several modern-day Indian languages.
Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers said that the findings are not consistent with the theory known as the "Kurgan expansion" and instead support the "Anatolian farmer" theory.
"In striking agreement with the Anatolian hypothesis, our analysis of a matrix of 87 languages with 2,449 lexical items produced an estimated age range for the initial Indo-European divergence of between 7,800 and 9,800 years BP (before present)," the researchers wrote. "These results were robust to changes in coding procedures, calibration points, rooting of the trees and priors in the Bayesian analysis."
The researchers collected several thousand words in the studied languages and then used computer analysis to determine how close various languages were to one another, and hence how recently they had probably diverged. The computer then produced an evolutionary tree leading back to the proto-Indo-European language.
