-A new study suggests that the sprawling Indo-European family of languages originated in Anatolia, or modern-day Turkey
Tracing the Origins of Indo-European Languages
Researchers studied the evolution of words across 103 modern and extinct languages from the Indo-European language family, and created a tree showing the relationships among the different languages, at right.
The map above shows where each major branch probably arose, before spreading and diversifying to other regions.
A competing hypothesis places the point of origin in the steppes of modern-day Ukraine and Russia, north of the Black Sea.