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No matter whether you speak English or Urdu, Waloon or Waziri, Portuguese or Persian, the roots of your language are the same. Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the mother tongue – shared by several hundred contemporary languages, as well as many now extinct, and spoken by people who lived from about 6,000 to 3,500 BC on the steppes to the north of the Caspian Sea.
They left no written texts and historical linguists have, since the 19th century, painstakingly reconstructed the language from daughter languages, the question of how it actually sounded was assumed to be permanently out of reach.
Now, researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford have developed a sound-based method to move back through the family tree of languages that stem from PIE. They can simulate how certain words would have when they were spoken 8,000 years ago.
Remarkably, at the of the technology is the statistics of shape. "Sounds have shape," explains Professor John Aston, from Cambridge's Statistical Laboratory. "As a word is uttered it vibrates air, and the shape of this soundwave can be measured and turned into a series of numbers. Once we have these stats, and the stats of another spoken word, we can start asking how similar they are and what it would take to shift from one to another."