Indo-European studies

Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics and an interdisciplinary field of study dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. Its goal is to amass information about the hypothetical proto-language from which all of these languages are descended, a language dubbed Proto-Indo-European (PIE), and its speakers, the Proto-Indo-Europeans, including their society and religion. The studies cover where the language originated and how it spread. This article also lists Indo-European scholars, centres, journals and book series.

The comparative method was formally developed in the 19th century and applied first to Indo-European languages. The existence of the Proto-Indo-Europeans had been inferred by comparative linguistics as early as 1640, while attempts at an Indo-European proto-language reconstruction date back as far as 1713. However, by the 19th century, still no consensus had been reached about the internal groups of the IE family.

The method of internal reconstruction is used to compare patterns within one dialect, without comparison with other dialects and languages, to try to arrive at an understanding of regularities operating at an earlier stage in that dialect. It has also been used to infer information about earlier stages of PIE than can be reached by the comparative method.

Using the method of mass comparison, the IE languages are sometimes hypothesized to be part of super-families such as Nostratic or Eurasiatic.

By the time of Socrates (469–399 BC), the Ancient Greeks were aware that their language had changed since the time of Homer (about 730 BC). Aristotle (about 330 BC) identified four types of linguistic change: insertion, deletion, transposition and substitution. In the 1st century BC, the Romans were aware of the similarities between Greek and Latin. There were also linguistic traditions in Mesopotamia and India; in the 4th century BC, Pāṇini wrote Aṣṭādhyāyī, a detailed grammar of Sanskrit.

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