Before the Nazis inadvertently made the word Aryan taboo in polite society, the word used to refer to a distant ancestor of (most) modern Europeans. If your grade school teacher, like mine, was of an older make, you may have been on the receiving end of a lecture on an ancient Indian people from whom (most) Europeans descend. If you were, I regret to tell you that’s no longer true.

Today, Aryan is a mostly academic word used to refer to a group of Indian languages. Instead, we say that most Europeans descend from the Indo-Europeans. That is the new, more politically and linguistically correct name for the Aryans of yesteryear. It’s a tricky word that gets used in many different ways, so let’s break it down.

When archaeologists or linguists say that something is Indo-European they mean that it belongs to a specific group of related languages and their associated cultures, whence came most European languages and cultures. We might, for example, say that Slavs are an Indo-European people. When we speak of the Indo-Europeans however -and some people do- we are confusing to academics and laypeople alike. In essence, the term refers to all those who speak or spoke Indo-European languages, which of course spans vast areas and several millennia. It’s not a very good and precise term. Additionally, we might speak of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Now we’re onto unstable ground, because now we are onto quite theoretical prehistory. These are the people who theoretically ought to have spoken a language that is the mother of all the Indo-European ones.

Are you with me so far? Let’s recap what we have learned. Once upon a time there was probably a group of people known today as the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Their language slowly split into dialects which became new languages, all of which were related to one another. We call them the Indo-European languages and the peoples who spoke them are referred to as Indo-European peoples. The Slavs are such a people. What other Indo-European peoples are there? This picture answers our question, and also teaches us further ways of grouping the Indo-European languages into smaller sections:

The Indo-European family tree (click for full size)

Okay, so that tells us that there are a great many languages over a vast area of mostly European soil that are somehow related. It also gives us a hint as to which ones are more related to each other than others and how the languages came to be. What it doesn’t really tell us is how it came to be that people as far apart as Iceland and India speak related languages, but the languages spoken in Sweden and Finland are not related at all. This is where we have to introduce another concept: the Indo-European migrations.

I should preface any discussion about Indo-European migrations with the warning that there are quite a few different ideas about how and when these migrations took place and in what order. Some scholars don’t want to speak of migrations at all, but rather a natural expansion.

The general idea is that the Proto-Indo-Europeans lived somewhere north east of the Black Sea. Some scholars will put them there during the Stone Age, others during the Bronze Age. They spoke a language we call Proto-Indo-European, which as you know is probably the mother of all the Indo-European languages. As people moved or expanded into more remote areas, their dialect developed separately from the others’ and so did their previously common culture and religion.

These off-shoot cultures got their own branches when they expanded into new territories, lost contact with the old or came into contact with new ideas from their neighbours. Eventually, the languages were no longer mutually intelligible and the customs were widely different from one another. Then war and conquest shuffled everything around just a little bit more, which is why a Celtic-speaking nation like Britain, with a Latin history, ends up with a West-Germanic language largely influenced by Scandinavian and Romance languages: English.

A general idea of Indo-European expansion

I will go into more detail about who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were at another time, which will better explain where all of these people came from and why our cultures are similar. But if you can’t wait, David Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (or the cheaper Kindle version) is an excellent book on the topic. It’s a bit on the long side, but worth it!

About the author: E P Wohlfart is a twenty-something freelance writer with a Classical Archaeology degree, a laptop and a maxed-out library card. Aside from administrating PastPresenters.com, which she started in 2008, she works with several historical publications and is a regular contributor at Suite101.