Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language

and the people who contributed to that history.

Over the last few episodes, we've looked at the oldest known ancestor of English.

The ancient Indo-European language called Proto-Indo-European Bilingualist.

We looked at how the language was discovered, and then how it was reconstructed.

We also looked at some of the reconstructed words, and the connection many of those words

have to modern English.

But who were these original Indo-European people?

As I've mentioned before, a large portion of this ancient language was reconstructed during

the 19th and 20th centuries, but linguists were not entirely sure who these people were.

Many of them had their own opinions and guesses, but there were so many theories that I probably

couldn't explore all of them in this episode.

And many of these theories were wrong, sometimes really wrong.

And even today, this remains one of the more controversial topics in linguistics.

There are still many differences of opinion as to the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans,

and the specific manner in which they migrated to the point where the various Indo-European

languages are spoken today.

And I'm certainly not going to resolve all of those debates in this episode.

But I do believe that a consensus as to the original homeland has started to emerge.

And that's the view I'm going to present here.

And while some linguists and historians may still disagree with some aspects of this

theory, the theory that I'm presenting in this episode is the majority view today.

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