SprachbundA sprachbund (ˈsprɑːkbʊnd ˈʃpʁaːxbʊnt, lit. "language federation"), also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, or diffusion area, is a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact. The languages may be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related, but the sprachbund characteristics might give a false appearance of relatedness. A grouping of languages that share features can only be defined as a sprachbund if the features are shared for some reason other than the genetic history of the languages.
Language shiftLanguage shift, also known as language transfer or language replacement or language assimilation, is the process whereby a speech community shifts to a different language, usually over an extended period of time. Often, languages that are perceived to be higher status stabilise or spread at the expense of other languages that are perceived by their own speakers to be lower-status. An example is the shift from Gaulish to Latin during the time of the Roman Empire. For prehistory, Forster et al.
Old Europe (archaeology)Old Europe is a term coined by the Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas to describe what she perceived as a relatively homogeneous pre-Indo-European Neolithic and Copper Age culture or civilisation in Southeast Europe, centred in the Lower Danube Valley. Old Europe is also referred to in some literature as the Danube civilisation. The term 'Danubian culture' was earlier coined by the archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe to describe early farming cultures (e.g.
Upper PaleolithicThe Upper Paleolithic (or Upper Palaeolithic) is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. Very broadly, it dates to between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago (the beginning of the Holocene), according to some theories coinciding with the appearance of behavioral modernity in early modern humans, until the advent of the Neolithic Revolution and agriculture. Anatomically modern humans (i.e. Homo sapiens) are believed to have emerged in Africa around 300,000 years ago.
Comparative linguisticsComparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness. Genetic relatedness implies a common origin or proto-language and comparative linguistics aims to construct language families, to reconstruct proto-languages and specify the changes that have resulted in the documented languages. To maintain a clear distinction between attested and reconstructed forms, comparative linguists prefix an asterisk to any form that is not found in surviving texts.
Proto-Indo-EuropeansThe 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).
Proto-Indo-European homelandThe Proto-Indo-European homeland (or Indo-European homeland) was the prehistoric linguistic homeland of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). From this region, its speakers migrated east and west, and went on to form the proto-communities of the different branches of the Indo-European language family. The most widely accepted proposal about the location of the Proto-Indo-European homeland is the steppe hypothesis, which puts the archaic, early, and late PIE homeland in the Pontic–Caspian steppe around 4,000 BCE.
