ABSTRACT
About half of the world’s population speaks a language belonging to the IndoEuropean family. Beginning in about 3000 B.C.E., Indo-European tribes migrated from areas surrounding the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea (areas now belonging to southern Russia and eastern Ukraine) and settled throughout Europe and the Near and Middle East. By 1000 B.C.E., most of the original migrations were complete and the language of the individual tribes began to differentiate into ancestors of the modern Indo-European languages. Adding to the diversity, many speakers of non-IndoEuropean languages live or have at one time lived in Europe.
