EurasianStudies_0110..

January-March 2010 JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES Volume II., Issue 1.
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been put forward by Cavalli-Sforza and his school (see for example Cavalli Sforza (1999)), but has in fact
been disproven by historical, documentary evidence.
The question then arises: what is the correct interpretation of the concept of ‘language family’? As
pointed out above, a ‘language family’ cannot be equated with an ‘ethnic family’ – and this is the case
not only for the IE family, but also, and even more so, for other language families, such as Uralic and
Semitic. Neither can this concept be conceived of as a sort of ‘parthenogenesis’ (cladogram, according to
current terminology), through which the various languages forming the family tree came into being
splitting in ordered sequence. The concept of language family is instead to be interpreted in terms of an
‘archetypical’ (and not necessarily compact) linguistic entity that subsumes within itself all the features
present in the early attested languages for each language group of a given family. In other words, a
‘mother language’ in the strict sense of the term does not really exist; rather, this is a metaphor through
which linguists represent the oldest reconstructable ‘point of convergence’ of the shared features of a
given language group/family, and from which these shared features are then passed on to the historical
languages.
Since we cannot be at all sure that an IE population existed in pre-historical times, we have to strongly
doubt also the existence of an IE homeland. Instead, there must have been a community – quite possibly
an ethnically distinct community, as it was often the case – that used a relatively homogeneous linguistic
structure. This linguistic structure then in time evolved into those old historical languages whose (more
or less extended) records have been passed on to us. It is only in these terms that we can legitimately talk
about and use the concept of language family, without charging it with ethno-sociological implications it
cannot have – unless one is prepared to stretch its meaning in an inappropriate and unscientific way.
REFERENCES
Barbujani, G., 2009. “Confini genetici e diversità linguistica”, in P. Cotticelli Kurras e G. Graffi
(a cura di), Lingue, ethnos e popolazioni: evidenze linguistiche, biologiche e culturali. Atti del XXXII
Congresso della Società Italiana di Glottologia, Roma: Il Calamo, pp. 33-54.
Belardi, W., 1990a. “Genealogia, tipologia, ricostruzione e leggi fonetiche”, in Id., Linguistica
generale, filologia e critica dell'espressione, Roma: Bonacci, pp. 155-216
Belardi, W., 1990b. “A proposito di lessemi romanzi nel bavarese meridionale antico”, in Stirpi
e imprestiti, Roma: Dipartimento di Studi glottoantropologici, pp. 77-86.
Belle, E. M. S. & G. Barbujani, 2007. “Worldwide Analysis of Multiple Microsatellites:
Language Diversity has a Detectable Influence on DNA Diversity”, American Journal of Physical
Anthropology 133, pp. 1137-1146.
Cavalli Sforza, L., 1999. Geni, popolazioni e lingue, in G. Longobardi (a cura di), Le lingue del
mondo, Quaderni “Le Scienze” (ed. it. di Scientific American), 108, giugno 1999, pp. 46-52.
Di Giovine, P., 2009. Verbal Inflection from “Proto-Indo-European” to the Indo-European Languages:
A Matter of Coherence? in: A. Marcantonio (ed.): The Indo-European Language Family: Questions
about its Status, Monograph series nr. 55 of ‘Journal of Indo-European Studies’, Washington
DC: Institute for the Study of Man, 2009, 6 (pp. 1-27).
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