A New Model of Indo—European Subgrouping and Dispersal

In this century two great discoveries have shaken our view of the Indo—European family tree and protolanguage. The first was the discovery of Hittite, which in turn revealed the existence of an Anatolian branch of Indo—European; the second was the discovery in Central Asia of languages belonging to the previously unknown Tocharian branch of the family. Yet as important as these are, they are not the only twentieth century archaeological finds with Indo—European ramifications. In this paper I will explore the implications of a less dramatic set of discoveries for Indo—European subgrouping. I begin with a question posed in recent work by Johanna Nichols. Like many profound questions, this one is both shockingly obvious and disturbingly obscure: Why does Indo—European have so many branches? Ten are fully documented, and the count rises if you add the so—called ‘minor’ languages – Phrygian, Macedonian, Thracian, Venetic, and others known only through inscriptional remains. This is shown graphically in (1):