971. Linguists have traced modern languages like English and Sanskrit back thousands of years to a single Proto-Indo-European source. This week, we explore their detective work and the debates around the origins of the ancestral tongue.

This piece was written by Kurt Kleiner, a freelance science and technology writer living in Toronto. It originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a digital publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Explore the latest at knowablemagazine.org.

| Edited transcript with links: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/indo-european/transcript

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Where did our language start? 21:32 Share

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Where did our language start?