Proto-Indo-European language

: PIE redirects here. See Pie (disambiguation) for other uses of PIE.

Relationship to other language families

Many higher-level relationships between PIE and other language families have been proposed. Due to the great time depths, there is necessarily a great deal of speculation involved, and as a result the proposals are very controversial. Perhaps the most widely accepted proposal is of an Indo-Uralic family, encompassing PIE and Uralic. The evidence usually cited in favor of this is the proximity of the proposed homelands of the two families, the typological similarity between the two languages, and a number of apparent shared morphemes. Other proposals, further back in time (and correspondingly less accepted), link PIE and Uralic with Altaic and certain other families in Asia, such as Korean, Japanese, Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut (representative proposals are Nostratic and Joseph Greenberg's Eurasiatic); still more distant proposals link some or all of these to Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian, etc., and ultimately to a single Proto-World family (nowadays mostly associated with Merritt Ruhlen). Various proposals, with varying levels of skepticism, also exist that join some subset of the putative Eurasiatic language families and/or some of the Caucasian language families, such as Uralo-Siberian, Ural-Altaic (once widely accepted but now largely discredited), Proto-Pontic, etc.

Related Topics:
Indo-Uralic - Uralic - Altaic - Korean - Japanese - Chukotko-Kamchatkan - Eskimo-Aleut - Nostratic - Joseph Greenberg - Eurasiatic - Afro-Asiatic - Dravidian - Proto-World - Merritt Ruhlen - Caucasian - Uralo-Siberian - Ural-Altaic - Proto-Pontic

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