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Subfield of linguistics

Indo European studies (Indogermanistik) is a field of linguistics and an interdisciplinary field of study dealing with Indo European languages, both current and extinct. The goal of those engaged in these studies is to amass information about the hypothetical proto language from which all of these languages are descended, a language dubbed Proto Indo European (PIE), and its speakers, the Proto Indo Europeans, including their society and Proto Indo European mythology. The studies cover where the language originated and how it spread. This article also lists Indo European scholars, centres, journals and book series.

The comparative method was formally developed in the 19th century and applied first to Indo European languages. The existence of the Proto Indo Europeans had been inferred by comparative linguistics as early as 1640, while attempts at an Indo European proto language reconstruction date back as far as 1713. However, by the 19th century, still no consensus had been reached about the internal groups of the IE family. The method of internal reconstruction is used to compare patterns within one dialect, without comparison with other dialects and languages, to try to arrive at an understanding of regularities operating at an earlier stage in that dialect. It has also been used to infer information about earlier stages of PIE than can be reached by the comparative method. The IE languages are sometimes hypothesized to be part of super families such as Nostratic or Eurasiatic.

The ancient Greeks were aware that their language had changed since the time of Homer (about 730BC). Aristotle (about 330BC) identified four types of linguistic change: insertion, deletion, transposition and substitution. In the 1st century BC, the Romans were aware of the similarities between Greek and Latin. In the post classical West, with the influence of Christianity, language studies were undermined by the attempt to derive all languages from Hebrew since the time of Saint Augustine. Prior studies classified the European languages as Japhetic. One of the first scholars to challenge the idea of a Hebrew root to the languages of Europe was Joseph Scaliger (1540 – 1609). He identified Greek, Germanic, Romance and Slavic language groups by comparing the word for "God" in various European languages. In 1710, Leibniz applied ideas of gradualism and uniformitarianism to linguistics in a short essay. Like Scaliger, he rejected a Hebrew root, but also rejected the idea of unrelated language groups and considered them all to have a common source. Around the 12th century, similarities between European languages became recognised. In Iceland, scholars noted the resemblances between Icelandic and English. Gerald of Wales claimed that Welsh, Cornish, and Breton were descendants of a common source. A study of the Insular Celtic languages was carried out by George Buchanan in the 16th century and the first field study was by Edward Llwyd around 1700. He published his work in 1707, shortly after translating a study by Paul Yves Pezron on Breton. Grammars of European languages other than Latin and Classical Greek began to be published at the end of the 15th century. This led to comparison between the various languages. In the 16th century, visitors to India became aware of similarities between Indian and European languages. For example, Filippo Sassetti reported striking resemblances between Sanskrit and Italian.

The classical phase of Indo European comparative linguistics leads from Bopp to August Schleicher's 1861 Compendium and up to Karl Brugmann's 5 volume Grundriss (outline of Indo European languages) published from 1886 to 1893. Brugmann's Neogrammarian re evaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussure's proposal of the concept of "consonantal schwa" (which later evolved into the laryngeal theory) may be considered the beginning of "contemporary" Indo European studies. The Indo European proto language as described in the early 1900s in its main aspects is still accepted today, and the work done in the 20th century has been cleaning up and systematizing, as well as the incorporation of new language material, notably the Anatolian and Tocharian branches unknown in the 19th century, into the Indo European framework. Notably, the laryngeal theory, in its early forms barely noticed except as a clever analysis, became mainstream after the 1927 discovery by Jerzy Kuryłowicz of the survival of at least some of these hypothetical phonemes in Anatolian. Julius Pokorny in 1959 published his Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, an updated and slimmed down reworking of the three volume Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der indogermanischen Sprachen of Alois Walde and Julius Pokorny (1927 – 1932). Both of these works aim to provide an overview of the lexical knowledge accumulated until the early 20th century, but with only stray comments on the structure of individual forms; in Pokorny 1959, then recent trends of morphology and phonology (e. g., the laryngeal theory), go unacknowledged, and he largely ignores Anatolian and Tocharian data. The generation of Indo Europeanists active in the last third of the 20th century, such as Oswald Szemerényi, Calvert Watkins, Warren Cowgill, Jochem Schindler, Helmut Rix, developed a better understanding of morphology and, in the wake of Kuryłowicz's 1956 L'apophonie en indo européen, ablaut. Rix's Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben appeared in 1997 as a first step towards a modernization of Pokorny's dictionary; corresponding tomes addressing the noun, Nomina im Indogermanischen Lexikon, appeared in 2008, and pronouns and particles, Lexikon der indogermanischen Partikeln und Pronominalstämme, in 2014. Current efforts are focused on a better understanding of the relative chronology within the proto language, aiming at distinctions of "early", "middle" and "late", or "inner" and "outer" PIE dialects, but a general consensus has yet to form. From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian began to be of a certainty sufficient stage to allow it to influence the image of the proto language (see also Indo Hittite). Such attempts at recovering a sense of historical depth in PIE have been combined with efforts towards linking the history of the language with archaeology, notably with the Kurgan hypothesis. J. P. Mallory's 1989 In Search of the Indo Europeans and 1997 Encyclopedia of Indo European Culture gives an overview of this. Purely linguistic research was bolstered by attempts to reconstruct the culture and mythology of the Proto Indo Europeans by scholars such as Georges Dumézil, as well as by archaeology (e. g. Marija Gimbutas, Colin Renfrew) and genetics (e. g. Luigi Luca Cavalli Sforza). These speculations about the realia of Proto Indo European culture are however not part of the field of comparative linguistics, but rather a sister discipline.

Marxists such as Bruce Lincoln (himself an Indo Europeanist) have criticized aspects of Indo European studies believed to be overly reactionary. In the 1980s, Georges Dumézil and Indo European studies in general came under fire from historian Arnaldo Momigliano, who accused Indo European studies of being created by fascists bent on combating "Judeo Christian" society. Momigliano was himself a veteran member of the National Fascist Party, but was not open about this. Edgar C. Polomé, an Indo Europeanist and co editor of Mankind Quarterly, described Momigliano and Lincoln's criticism as "unfair and vicious", and connected criticism of Indo European studies with Marxism and political correctness. More recently, the Swedish Marxist historian Stefan Arvidsson has followed up on Momigliano's criticism of Indo European studies. Arvidsson considers Indo European studies to be a pseudoscientific field, and has described Indo European mythology as "the most sinister mythology of modern times". In his works, Arvidsson has sought to expose what he considers to be fascist political sympathies of Indo Europeanists, and suggested that such an exposure may result in the abolition ("Ragnarök") of the concept of Indo European mythology.