Linguists have made a "significant breakthrough" regarding the origin of Indo-European languages. The linguists say the origins go back more than 8,100 years. Their study may settle a 200-year-old dispute over where English came from. One school of thought says it has its roots on the northern shore of the Black Sea. A competing theory is that English originated from Anatolia (present-day Turkey) 9,000 years ago.

Nearly half the world speaks Indo-European languages. The most commonly spoken are English, Hindi, Urdu, Spanish and Bengali. Each of these have over 100 million native speakers. Linguists created a databank of core vocabulary from 161 Indo-European languages. They concluded that their analysis suggested that the answer to the 200-year-old Indo-European enigma is a hybrid of the Steppe and Anatolia theories.