> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://linguisticdiscovery.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # How did the Indo-Europeans spread? - URL: https://linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/2025-12/ - Published: 2025-03-27T14:36:08.000Z - Updated: 2026-04-17T01:38:09.000Z - Description: Also this week: What does conversation look like in the brain? Here’s what happened this week in language and linguistics. - Author: Daniel W. Hieber, Ph.D. - Tags: Current Linguistics, Proto-Indo-European, language policy, protolanguage, neurolinguistics Welcome to this week’s edition of *Discovery Dispatch*, a weekly roundup of the latest language-related news, research in linguistics, interesting reads from the week, and newest books and other media dealing with language and linguistics. 🌠 This week’s issue of **Discovery Dispatch* is sponsored by ****The Humane Space**, an app that injects more curiosity into your daily life through beautiful immersive lessons and guided contemplations. I had the great pleasure of getting to work with The Humane Space last year to put together a week’s worth of lessons on linguistics ([which you can see here!](https://thehumanespace.page.link/?link=https://thehumane.space/segments/1226/node-index&apn=com.thehumanespace.app&isi=6443709613&ibi=org.thehumanespace.app&ref=linguisticdiscovery.com)), and I love the philosophy with which they approach their lessons. They aim to inject a little wonder and curiosity into your every day, which is exactly what I try to do with Linguistic Discovery. Their lessons cover a huge range of topics, from linguistics to weaving to gardening to the Norse goddess of winter Skaði. Every day is a little intellectual adventure. If you’re interested in trying out The Humane Space, you can get a ****free month** subscription to the app at the link: [Get a free month of The Humane Space](https://thehumanespace.app.link/e/jO1KvuFLHPb?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/2025/03/image-31.png) ## 🆕 New from Linguistic Discovery *This week's content from Linguistic Discovery.* ### Linguistic Idiocentrism > I love how people immediately leap from “I’ve never heard that” to “nobody says that” or “that’s just wrong” [https://t.co/gs0497aik2](https://t.co/gs0497aik2?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) > > — Linguistic Discovery (@lingdiscovery) [March 22, 2025](https://twitter.com/lingdiscovery/status/1903526614413316282?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) Whenever I mention any sort of dialect diversity in English (words, phrases, or pronunciations that are particular to specific dialects) on social media, I inevitably receive comments along the lines of “nobody says that” or “that’s incorrect”, rather than simply, “I’ve never encountered that. That’s different from how I talk.” Seeing this so often on social media reminds me of the False Consensus Fallacy: > a pervasive cognitive bias that causes people to “see their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively common and appropriate to existing circumstances”. ([Wikipedia: False consensus effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False%5Fconsensus%5Feffect?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com)) You might call the linguistic version of this **Idiolectal Bias** or maybe **Linguistic Idiocentrism**—the belief that your particular way of speaking is in some way more common, standard, or correct. This is why most people think they don’t speak with an accent. The reality is, however, we don’t have as much exposure to other ways of speaking as we think; and even when we *do* encounter such variation, we’re really bad at noticing it. I linked to a study [a few weeks ago](https://linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/2025-07/) that showed just how bad, in fact: [Unraveling the Complexities of Accent IdentificationCOLUMBUS, Ohio – When we think about accents, it might seem as though discerning one voice from another is as simple as hearing how differently a word is pronounced. Those of us who have grown up s![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/icon/cropped-scienmag_ico-270x270-2.jpg)ScienmagSCIENMAG![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/thumbnail/Unraveling-the-Complexities-of-Accent-Identification-1739452257-1.jpg)](https://scienmag.com/unraveling-the-complexities-of-accent-identification/?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) So the next time you encounter a way of speaking you’ve never heard before, consider the strong likelihood that a lot more people say it that way than you realize! [Protolanguage: Meaning + Examples Explained - Rosetta StoneLearn all about what a protolanguage is, including common examples and how linguists use them to understand more about the languages we speak today.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/icon/cropped-RS-logo.png)Rosetta StoneJennifer Gunner![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/thumbnail/protolanguage-stone-writing-min.jpg)](https://blog.rosettastone.com/protolanguage/?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) ## Sign up for the Linguistic Discovery newsletter! A weekly newsletter showcasing the diversity of the world's languages. Topics include: ⚙️ how language works and changes 🌍 surveys of the diverse ways that languages do things 🗣️ language profiles ℹ️ explainers of terms and concepts in linguistics ⭐ reviews of books and other media. 🆕 a weekly digest of the latest language-related news Some posts are for paid subscribers only, but most are free. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. **You can also subscribe on* [**Patreon*](https://www.patreon.com/linguisticdiscovery?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) *or* [**Substack*](https://linguisticdiscovery.substack.com/) *if you prefer to use those platforms instead. You'll get all the same content and extras.* ## 📰 In the News *Language and linguistics in the news.* In response to Trump’s executive order declaring English the official language of the executive branch, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) has issued a statement against it: - [Four reasons why English should not be the official language of the United States](https://www.lsadc.org/content.asp?admin=Y&contentid=468&ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) The LSA’s main points, backed by various studies which they cite, are: - The United States has always been a multilingual country, and this gives it strength. - Citizens of the US and of all democracies inevitably have different linguistic ways of navigating their lives, and enforced monolingualism never achieves national unity. - “Official English” policies do not improve economic prospects for those who arrive in the US speaking another language, nor do they improve communication for those who live in multilingual communities. - Supporting and promoting multilingualism makes a nation stronger, not weaker. In a similar but more caustic vein, linguists Mark Turn and Ross Perlin (the latter of whom authored the bestselling book *Language city: The fight to preserve endangered mother tongues in New York* \[[Amazon](https://amzn.to/49TumNj?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) | [Bookshop](https://bookshop.org/a/110785/9780802162465?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com)\]) wrote an article in *The Conversation* trenchantly attacking Trump’s order as reflecting the president’s own “linguistic insecurity, \[…\] weakness, and fear”. [Trump’s English language order upends America’s long multilingual historyAcross its nearly 250-year history, the United States has never had an official language until now. But Americans will not stop using languages other than English because of an executive order.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/icon/web-app-logo-192x192-2d05bdd6de6328146de80245d4685946-12.png)The ConversationMark Turin![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/thumbnail/file-20250312-56-7hayne.jpg)](https://theconversation.com/trumps-english-language-order-upends-americas-long-multilingual-history-252163?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) For my own take on Trump’s order, check out this issue of the newsletter: [The linguistics of Trump’s official English policyTrump issued an executive order making English the official language of the U.S.—sort of. Here’s what that order does, and what language in the U.S. looks like today.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/icon/languages-bordered-22.png)Linguistic DiscoveryDaniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/thumbnail/English-Only--social-preview--2.png)](https://linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/trump-official-english/) ## 🗞️ Current Linguistics *Recently published research in linguistics.* ### Predicting what conversation looks like in the brain ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/2025/03/image-32.png) Researchers have long tried to map different aspects of speech onto activity in different regions of the brain. As you might expect, it’s nowhere near as straightforward as we’d like: saying the word “apple” doesn’t always light up the same areas of the brain in the same ways. Language is highly context-dependent. And speech is such a complex network of sounds and words and syntactic constructions and meanings that it’s impossible to cleanly map these various components of language onto brain activity. In the past, researchers have avoided this problem by focusing on just one aspect of speech at a time—prosody (like we looked at [the other week](https://linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/2025-10/)), syntax, meaning, etc. [Babies can learn multiple languages from birth—and they’ll slow the onset of dementia if they doBabies can learn multiple languages from birth—and they’ll slow the onset of dementia if they do. Here’s what happened this week in language and linguistics.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/icon/languages-bordered-23.png)Linguistic DiscoveryDaniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/thumbnail/pitch-accent.png)](https://linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/2025-10/) This study uses a speech recognition model called Whisper instead, which is designed to transcribe audio recordings of natural conversations. Whisper analyzes the speech stream at multiple levels, just like language itself—low-level acoustic information all the way up to high-level information about which words tend to appear in which contexts. The authors recorded about 100 hours of conversation while monitoring the brain activity of the speech participants using electrocorticography (ECoG)—a corpus of 520,209 words, which is incredibly large for an experiment measuring brain activity. Traditional experiments in this area involve participants reading a passage of text or just a few dozen sentences. So the scale of the data for this study is remarkable, enabling a much more accurate computational model of speech. What the authors found is that the internal representations created by the Whisper language model mapped onto brain activity better than traditional computational models which don’t create these hierarchical internal representations. And they were able to watch speech production and processing happen in real-time. They could see, for example, that the brain progresses from thinking about what it wants to say, to beginning to form sounds. Then, after listening, the brain thinks back on what was just said. [Smooth talker: Hebrew University study gives insight into brain’s role in linguistic interactionThe research bridged acoustic, speech, and word-level linguistic structures, offering unprecedented insights into how the brain processes everyday speech in real-world settings.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/icon/jp-favicon-180.png)The Jerusalem PostARIELA OHRENSTEIN![](https://images.jpost.com/image/upload/f_auto,fl_lossy/c_fill,g_faces:center,h_407,w_690/653160)](https://www.jpost.com/science/article-845163?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) [A unified acoustic-to-speech-to-language embedding space captures the neural basis of natural language processing in everyday conversations - Nature Human BehaviourThis study links acoustic, speech and linguistic data with brain activity during real-life conversations to create a model that predicts neural responses during speech with high accuracy.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/icon/apple-touch-icon-f39cb19454-5.png)NatureAriel Goldstein![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/thumbnail/41562_2025_2105_Fig1_HTML.png)](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02105-9?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) ### The genetic spread of the Indo-Europeans ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/2025/03/image-33.png) I reported [last month](https://linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/2025-06/) that new DNA evidence helped further solidify our understanding of the origins of the Indo-European peoples and their language, called Proto-Indo-European. Current evidence tells a story where Pre-Indo-European peoples migrated from Anatolia to the Ukrainian steppe just north of the Black Sea sometime before 3000 BCE. They then mixed with the local people there, becoming a group that archaeologists call the Yamnaya. [The quest for the first Indo-Europeans, and whales communicating like humansNew DNA evidence emerges in the hunt for the first speakers of Indo-European, and researchers discover that whalesong shares a property of human language never before found in the animal kingdom.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/icon/languages-bordered-24.png)Linguistic DiscoveryDaniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/thumbnail/69c23780-fb7a-4792-8eba-0ec067af48b0_800x399.webp)](https://linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/2025-06/) The Yamnaya would go on to have a profound impact on Eurasian history. They were likely the first people to ride horses and use wheeled carts, making them an unstoppable invading force for other cultures of Eurasia at the time. They spread rapidly across the Eurasian steppe and throughout Europe, bringing their languages with them and often killing the males of any society who resisted. As a result of this tidal wave of cultural replacement and the subsequent histories of their descendants, today about 42% of the world’s population speaks an Indo-European language. While last month’s reporting on this research focused on its linguistic implications, this round of reporting is now drawing attention to the genetic implications: the descendants of the original Indo-Europeans can trace their ancestry to the Yamnaya of 5,000 years ago—and indeed to a *single hamlet* in the Russian-occupied region of Ukraine called Mykhailivka, an archaeological site spanning 3635–3383 BCE. The authors came to this conclusion by analyzing the DNA samples from 450 prehistoric individuals taken from 100 sites in Europe, as well as data from 1,000 samples that had been previously analyzed. The DNA of an individual from Mykhailivka is the crucial genetic link between the earlier peoples that migrated into the region and the later Yamnaya. - **Reporting:** [The ancient horsemen who created the modern world](https://www.wsj.com/science/the-ancient-horsemen-who-created-the-modern-world-ba4b314d?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) (WSJ) - Non-paywalled version available at MSN [here](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-ancient-horsemen-who-created-the-modern-world/ar-AA1AumN2?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com). [A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age - NatureWhole-genome sequencing analysis of 81 prehistoric individuals reveals how the genetic makeup of people from the North Pontic region was influenced by waves of migration during the Eneolithic period and Early Bronze Age.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/icon/apple-touch-icon-f39cb19454-6.png)NatureAlexey G. Nikitin![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/thumbnail/41586_2024_8372_Fig1_HTML-1.png)](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08372-2?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com) --- That’s it for this week! Thank you so much for being a subscriber, and I hope you enjoyed this issue! If you’d like to support Linguistic Discovery and help educate the world about the science and diversity of language, consider becoming a supporter! You’ll get bonus articles/videos and early access to chapters of my book! [💝 Become a supporter!](#/portal/signup) Have a great week! \~ Danny ## 🚫 Errata *Corrections and clarifications.* In [my post on guacamole](https://linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/guacamole/), I said that the word *mōlli* meant ‘sauce’, and while this is true, it obscures the fact that *mōlli*, like *āhuacatl* ‘avocado’, has a noun suffix at the end of it. The *\-tl* suffix becomes *\-li* after stems ending in /l/, so the base of *mōlli* is just *mōl-*. I also had a small typo in the word *āhuaca-*. Taking all this into consideration, I updated the etymological flowchart for ‘guacamole’, and the text of the accompanying article: [![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/2025/03/image-34.png)](https://linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/guacamole/) [guacamoleWhere do the words “avocado” and “guacamole” come from?![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/icon/languages-bordered-25.png)Linguistic DiscoveryDaniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c7/75/c775a216-7ca2-4c5f-96a7-f2defe0fd756/content/images/thumbnail/carousel-1.png)](https://linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/guacamole/) --- 💡 The Amazon and Bookshop.org links on this site are affiliate links, which means that I earn a small commission from those companies for purchases made through them (at no extra cost to you). If you'd like to support Linguistic Discovery, purchasing through these links is a great way to do so! I greatly appreciate your support! [Check out my entire Amazon storefront here.](https://www.amazon.com/shop/linguisticdiscovery?ref=linguisticdiscovery.com)