A
proto-language is the common ancestor of the
languageA language is a system for encoding and decoding information. In its most common use, the term refers to so-called "natural languages" — the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. In linguistics the term is extended to refer to the human cognitive facility of creating and using...
s that form a
language familyA language family is a group of languages related by descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family.As with biological families, the evidence of relationship is observable shared characteristics...
. Occasionally, the
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. Around the world, German is spoken by approximately 105 million native speakers and also by...
term
Ursprache (from
Ur- "primordial" and
Sprache "language") is used instead.
Often the proto-language is not known directly. In such cases, it may be
reconstructedLinguistic reconstruction is the practice of establishing the features of the unattested ancestor of one or more given languages. There are two kinds of reconstruction. Internal reconstruction uses irregularities in a single language to make inferences about an earlier stage of that language...
by comparing different members of the language family through the
comparative methodIn linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages. It requires the use of two or more languages. It is opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which studies the internal development of a single language over time. Ordinarily both methods are...
. The level of completeness of the reconstruction achieved varies, depending on how complete the evidence is from the descendant languages and on the quality of the effort of the linguists working on it.
A
proto-language is the common ancestor of the
languageA language is a system for encoding and decoding information. In its most common use, the term refers to so-called "natural languages" — the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. In linguistics the term is extended to refer to the human cognitive facility of creating and using...
s that form a
language familyA language family is a group of languages related by descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family.As with biological families, the evidence of relationship is observable shared characteristics...
. Occasionally, the
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. Around the world, German is spoken by approximately 105 million native speakers and also by...
term
Ursprache (from
Ur- "primordial" and
Sprache "language") is used instead.
Often the proto-language is not known directly. In such cases, it may be
reconstructedLinguistic reconstruction is the practice of establishing the features of the unattested ancestor of one or more given languages. There are two kinds of reconstruction. Internal reconstruction uses irregularities in a single language to make inferences about an earlier stage of that language...
by comparing different members of the language family through the
comparative methodIn linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages. It requires the use of two or more languages. It is opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which studies the internal development of a single language over time. Ordinarily both methods are...
. The level of completeness of the reconstruction achieved varies, depending on how complete the evidence is from the descendant languages and on the quality of the effort of the linguists working on it. Some of the many unattested proto-languages for which reconstructions have been devised are
Proto-Indo-EuropeanThe Proto-Indo-European language is the unattested, reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The existence of such a language has been accepted by linguists for over a century, and there have been many attempts at reconstruction...
,
Proto-UralicProto-Uralic is the hypothetical language ancestral to the Uralic language family, which includes Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic. No earlier protolanguage has been constructed....
, and
Proto-Dravidian-Hypothetical language:Proto-languages are, by definition, hypothetical languages reconstructed by linguists, and hence no proto-language has any historical record. So is the case with Proto-Dravidian...
.
In other cases, the proto-language is attested in surviving texts. For example,
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe...
is the proto-language of the
RomanceThe Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
language family, which includes such modern languages as French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. Likewise, Proto-Norse, the ancestor of the modern
Scandinavian languagesThe North Germanic languages or Scandinavian languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages, a sub-family of the Indo-European languages, along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages...
, is attested, albeit in fragmentary form, in ancient
runic inscriptionsThe runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages prior to the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter...
. Although there are no very early
Indo-AryanThe Indo-Aryan languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family.SIL International in a 2005 estimate counted a total of 209 varieties, the largest in terms of native speakers being Hindustani , Bengali , Punjabi , Marathi ,...
inscriptions, the Indo-Aryan languages of modern India all go back to
Vedic SanskritVedic Sanskrit is an Old Indic language. It is the language of the Vedas, the oldest shruti texts of Hinduism, compiled over the period of the mid 2nd to mid 1st millennium BC. It is an archaic form of Sanskrit, an early descendant of Proto-Indo-Iranian. It is closely related to Avestan, the...
(or dialects very closely related to it), which has been preserved in texts accurately handed down by parallel oral and written traditions for many centuries.
The first person to offer systematic reconstructions of an unattested proto-language was
August SchleicherAugust Schleicher was a German linguist. His great work was A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages, in which he attempted to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language...
; he did so for
Proto-Indo-EuropeanProto-Indo-European may refer to:*Proto-Indo-European language, the hypothetical common ancestor of the Indo-European languages.*Proto-Indo-Europeans, the hypothetical speakers of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language....
in 1861 (Lehmann 1993:26).