Firstly, many of the original speakers of PIE have gradually left their Urheimat between 4000 and 2000
BC, moving northwestward towards East-Central Europe and dispersing throughout the continent from
there, and southeastward towards Central Asia, moving east to China and south to the Indian
subcontinent in succeeding migrations. On the way they encountering different peoples and cultures
and intermixed with them, giving rise to the different branches of the language family today.
By Joshua Jonathan –
Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38133641
And secondly, the Age of Colonization has brought the comparatively “new” descendant languages of
PIE to America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, making Indo-European the most widely spoken language
family in the world.
Proto Indo Europeans According to Wikipedia
The Proto-Indo-Europeans are a hypothetical prehistoric population of Eurasia who spoke Proto-Indo-
European (PIE), the ancestor of the Indo-European languages according to linguistic reconstruction.
Knowledge of them comes chiefly from that linguistic reconstruction, along with material evidence
from archaeology and archaeogenetics. The Proto-Indo-Europeans likely lived during the late Neolithic,
or roughly the 4th millennium BC. Mainstream scholarship places them in the Pontic–Caspian
steppe zone in Eurasia (present-day Ukraine and southern Russia).[1] Some archaeologists would extend
the time depth of PIE to the middle Neolithic (5500 to 4500 BC) or even the early Neolithic (7500 to
5500 BC) and suggest alternative location hypotheses.
By the early second millennium BC, descendants of the Proto-Indo-Europeans had reached far and wide
across Eurasia, including Anatolia (Hittites), the Aegean (the linguistic ancestors of Mycenaean Greece),
the north of Europe (Corded Ware culture), the edges of Central Asia (Yamnaya culture), and
southern Siberia (Afanasievo culture).[2]
Definition
In the words of philologist Martin L. West, "If there was an Indo-European language, it follows that there
was a people who spoke it: not a people in the sense of a nation, for they may never have formed a
political unity, and not a people in any racial sense, for they may have been as genetically mixed as any