Study finds Europe, Asia shared common language 15,000 years ago

Languages spoken by billions of people across Europe and Asia are descended from an ancient tongue uttered in southern Europe at the end of the last ice age, according to research.

The claim, by scientists in Britain, points to a common origin for vocabularies as varied as English and Urdu, Japanese and Itelmen, a language spoken along the northeastern edge of Russia.

The ancestral language, spoken at least 15,000 years ago, gave rise to seven more that formed a Eurasiatic "superfamily", the researchers say. These split into languages now spoken all over Eurasia, from Portugal to Siberia.

"Everybody in Eurasia can trace their linguistic ancestry back to a group or groups … living around 15,000 years ago, probably in southern Europe, as the ice sheets were retreating," Reading University evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel said.

Linguists have long debated the idea of an ancient Eurasiatic superfamily, a controversial idea because many words evolve too rapidly to preserve their ancestry. Most have a 50 per cent chance of being replaced by an unrelated term every 2,000 to 4,000 years.

But some words last much longer. In a previous study Pagel's team showed that certain words - among them frequently used pronouns, numbers and adverbs - survived for tens of thousands of years before other words replaced them.