Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.5

c14.5

Today we can recognize the Indo-European group of languages as a relatively junior member of the Old World linguistic family, evolving at a time when such languages as Sumerian and those in the Hamitic and Semitic groups were of respectable antiquity. The original ancestral language from which its known variants developed and spread seems to have been mixed from the start and to have incorporated two main elements, one Uralic and the other probably related to the Caucasian group, and this mixture, with the emergence of a distinctive language group, is likely to have taken place somewhere on the outer boundaries of the kingdom of Sumer and Akkad, between South Russia and Turkestan. If there ever was an original Indo-European unity, in language at least, internal division into dialects and variants must soon have taken place. Early divisions in the main linguistic group can be traced, probably partly a result of an actual spread of populations west and east from the area of origin.