Since most languages were formed before written history began, we don’t always know how they started — or how they branched into the thousands of languages that exist today. So, how can we learn more about how languages started?
Linguists try to answer this question by connecting modern languages with prehistoric protolanguages. While you can’t learn a protolanguage on Rosetta Stone, you can learn languages descended from protolanguages. Find out how protolanguages give us more information about the languages spoken around the world today and how these protolanguages reveal more about the foundations of languages as we understand them.
Table of Contents
What is a protolanguage?
A protolanguage is defined as a hypothetical ancestor language for modern languages, often called daughter languages. It comes from the Greek word prôtos, which means “first,” indicating that a protolanguage is the first language.
Protolanguages are reconstructed from related parts of languages, such as grammar, vocabulary, and linguistic patterns. They represent a language’s first stages before being influenced by neighboring cultures and languages to shift into distinctive new languages. Since protolanguages are prehistoric and hypothetical, you won’t find much evidence of them except as linguistic theories.
Common characteristics of protolanguages include:
- limited linguistic complexity
- limited vocabulary
- no existing speakers
- no written literature or texts
- no known pronunciation
Think about protolanguages the way you think about genetics. You may not be able to name your ancestors from one thousand years ago, even though you know they exist. If you wanted to write a story about them, you could use the common traits from your family to describe a hypothetical ancestor. Instead of traits like brown hair and blue eyes, protolanguages are connected by traits like common words and grammatical features.
Protolanguage vs. language family
Linguists think about protolanguages in genetic terms, even though language itself isn’t genetic. You may have heard of language families, also known as genetically related languages. Language families are groups of languages that stem from the same protolanguage — that is, they share a language ancestor.
For example, you may have a cousin in your family who’s closely related to you and another cousin who’s very distantly related to you. You would all share that same hypothetical ancestor, who would have traits that link all three of you. That’s how language families work: They are languages connected by common traits that link back to a hypothetical protolanguage.
You can usually tell which language families are related to their protolanguages. Proto-Austronesian is the ancestor of languages in the Austronesian language family, for example, while Turkic languages can be traced back to Proto-Turkic.
List of common protolanguages
Protolanguages are mostly prehistoric, with Proto-Afroasiatic estimated to have been spoken between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. That’s why there are no written records of protolanguages to confirm how humans spoke them.
But thanks to the tireless efforts of archaeolinguists and linguistic anthropologists, we can connect most modern languages to their likely protolanguages. A few examples of protolanguages with commonly spoken daughter languages include:
| Protolanguage | Region (Modern-Day) | Daughter Languages |
| Proto-Afroasiatic | West Asia, Northeast Africa, Middle East | Arabic, Hebrew, Hausa |
| Proto-Austronesian | Southeast Asia and Pacific islands | Malay, Tagalog, Javanese |
| Proto-Dravidian | India | Tamil, Tegulu, Kannada |
| Proto-Indo-European | Europe, Southwest Asia | English, Spanish, Hindi |
| Proto-Niger-Congo | West and Central Africa | Swahili, Yoruba, Igbo |
| Proto-Sino-Tibetan | east Asia |
Mandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan |
| Proto-Turkic | East and Central Asia | Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani |
Examples of protolanguages
Some protolanguages have many daughter languages connected by common traits. Proto-Indo-European is the ancestor of over 150 Indo-European languages spoken by three billion people around the world today, while there are around 1,400 modern Niger-Congo languages related to Proto-Niger-Congo. Find out more about protolanguages that connect the most common languages spoken today.
Proto-Afroasiatic
Proto-Afroasiatic is the ancestor to modern languages primarily spoken in the Middle East and Northeast Africa. Some of its daughter languages are also protolanguages, including Proto-Semitic, the ancestor of modern-day Arabic and Hebrew.
Because Proto-Afroasiatic is one of the oldest protolanguages, few of its traits have survived in its descendant languages. However, some elements of Proto-Afroasiatic can be found in languages spoken today, including vowel changes in word formation and existing consonants.
Proto-Austronesian
Ancestor language to many cultures living in island countries in the Pacific, including the Philippines and Taiwan, Proto-Austronesian was a wide-ranging protolanguage. Its daughter protolanguages include Proto-Philippine (ancestor to modern-day Tagalog) and Proto-Micronesian.
Proto-Austronesian has a few surviving syntactical traits, including patterns of grammatical change with particles and affixes. You can see these characteristics in modern-day Tagalog, as well as Malay and other Polynesian languages.
Proto-Dravidian
Over 215 million people speak Dravidian languages in South Asia. These languages come from Proto-Dravidian, a protolanguage whose descendents include Tamil and Kannada.
Because Proto-Dravidian is a relatively recent protolanguage, linguists can name many of its traits based on language changes throughout different Dravidian languages. For example, we know that Proto-Dravidian has five vowels with long and short sounds, 16 consonants (including a variable consonant), and a monosyllabic root system that includes suffixes but not affixes.
Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language of the Indo-European language family, was mainly spoken throughout Europe and South Asia before the emergence of its daughter languages. Latin-based Romance languages like Spanish, Italian, and French, as well as Germanic languages like English and German, all descended from Proto-Indo-European.
Additional daughter languages of Proto-Indo-European include Russian (part of the Slavic language family), Hindi, and Armenian. Traits of Proto-Indo-European are evident in many of these languages, including three verb aspects, mood inflections, and gendered adjectives.
Proto-Niger-Congo
Around 85% of the African population speaks a Niger-Congo language descended from prehistoric Proto-Niger Congo. Swahili, Yoruba, Igbo, and Bantu languages spoken throughout Africa are all daughter languages of Proto-Niger Congo.
Of the characteristics shared by many languages in the Niger-Congo language family, a system of noun classes is the easiest one to see. Proto-Niger-Congo likely had a similar noun class system, as its daughter languages tend to have many noun classes (as many in 40 noun classes in the Atlantic branch of the language family).
Proto-Sino-Tibetan
Proto-Sinitic and Proto-Tibeto-Burman are two reconstructed descendants of Proto-Sino-TIbetan, a protolanguage spoken in modern-day East Asia. Today, its daughter languages fall into the Sinitic branch (which includes Mandarin, Cantonese, and other Chinese languages) and the Tibeto-Burman branch (which includes Tibetan and Burmese).
Linguists don’t believe Proto-Sino-Tibetan was a tonal language like many of its daughter languages. However, they do think traits of its vocabulary and typological features still connect the languages today.
Proto-Turkic
Uzbek, Turkish, and Azerbaijani are all daughter languages of Proto-Turkic, which was likely spoken in Central Asia (around modern-day Türkiye). Both Proto-Turkic and its descendants have a distinctive vowel harmony, meaning that all the vowels in a word are in the same subclass.
Many descendants of Proto-Turkic are agglutinative languages, meaning that they alter word meaning by adding different affixes. Linguists aren’t sure if Proto-Turkic shares this trait, though it did likely have additional plural suffixes added to nouns.
What is a language isolate?
If a protolanguage is an ancestor to modern languages, a language isolate is a language without a family. It’s not closely related enough to other languages to be in the same language family, and often, language isolates are the only daughter languages of their own protolanguages.
Examples of language isolates include:
- Basque
- Korean
- Bangi me
- Tiwi
- Cofán
Japanese is often considered a language isolate because it’s the only major language descended from Proto-Japonic. However, it’s closely related enough to nearby Ryukyuan languages that some linguists wouldn’t consider it a language isolate.
What is Proto-Human?
Is there one language that every other language comes from? The answer is yes — possibly. Proto-Human (also called Proto-World and Proto-Sapiens) is a theorized protolanguage spoken by early humans around 50,000 years ago.
Linguists believe that Proto-Human may have been spoken in East Africa and spread into nearby civilizations as the first spoken language. They cite subject-object-verb (SOV) word order as one of the main attributes shared by world languages, suggesting the existence of one main protolanguage as the ancestor to every language on Earth.
However, the theory of a Proto-Human language remains highly debated in the linguistic world. And like all protolanguages, there is no textual evidence of Proto-Human, making it only useful as a tool to understand modern languages and the way they grew into their current formations.
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