My proposed tree of Indo-European languages

[ToBeOrNotToBe]

I only associate the Z2103 tribes with the first stages of the expansion of proto-Indo-European. L51 is Bell Beaker and broadly Vasconic; their L23 ancestors went through Anatolia and into Europe while Z2103 headed through the Caucasus and into the Steppe, where they met the pre-Proto-Indo-European R1a-M417 and adopted their language, later taking it into Europe and Indo-Europeanizing their L51 cousins. The oldest R1b-Z2103 is from 5500 BC, a long enough time frame to allow this. This connects the Basque language to the Caucasian tongues and also allows a great deal of Basque survival, as their main clade, R1b-DF27, is descended from L51.

Not that my opinion is important, but I agree. As a reminder for the doubters, check here to see the distribution of IE languages from around 2000 BC - does the distribution of Western IE remind you of any particular culture? Celtic languages developed in the Hallstatt culture, meaning they are an extremely late import into the British Isles. And the only known Indo-European language native to Iberia is that of the Lusitanian folk, which was also an extremely late import. It just doesn't add up that this was spread around Europe by the Beaker folk - not least in Britain, where there was basically a wipeout of the local population. A Corded Ware origin seems likely.

[MOESAN]

I think since a long time in the tiny possibility of some Y-R1b L51/L11 not IE speakers (because of the Basque question) - NO certitude - but even if I take this vague hypothesis as valid I don't see myself as able to determine if as descendants it concerns only DF27 or others, like L21 - ATW I don't think the whole territory of BBs was under the control of the BBs prospectors spreaders of the "fashion" fine BB pottery and kit, and I don't think more that this prospectors-spreaders were the creators of the BB pottery style which I see born in Portugal among a not dominant population of early Chalco or pre-Chalco - could have been these BBs spreaders speakers of proto-Basque-Aquitan ??? I'm still puzzled. That said, we don't know when Lusitanian, Ligurian and W-Celtic were first spoken...

[Ygorcs]

Not that my opinion is important, but I agree. As a reminder for the doubters, check here to see the distribution of IE languages from around 2000 BC - does the distribution of Western IE remind you of any particular culture? Celtic languages developed in the Hallstatt culture, meaning they are an extremely late import into the British Isles. And the only known Indo-European language native to Iberia is that of the Lusitanian folk, which was also an extremely late import. It just doesn't add up that this was spread around Europe by the Beaker folk - not least in Britain, where there was basically a wipeout of the local population. A Corded Ware origin seems likely.

How can someone make a map of the languages of Europe in 2000 BCE when there was no writing at all in Europe at that time, probably not even in Greece/Crete? It's all speculation based on very incomplete knowledge, so we can't really take any conclusions from it. The map is a bit strange in that it assumes that the proto-languages of each of the IE subfamilies were already settled in or very near to the places their descendant languages were spoken in Late Antiquity. I don't think that's a given.

Indo-European languages could have been spoken all over, and we'll never know, we can only make educated guesses based on archaeology and genetics. We cannot just presume that the languages we found for example in Britain, Ireland and Iberia by the Roman Late Republic times (the earliest we can talk with any confidence about the linguistic makeup of Western Europe) were the first IE languages spoken there, or even the first languages, period. It's as if we had no written documentation about pre-Roman Iberia and we just assumed that Latin was the first wave of Indo-Europeanization in that region. I am absolutely confident that several IE languages and even entire branches went extinct due to the massive expansions of Hallstatt, La Tène and later Rome, Germanic and Slavic tribes - without leaving a single trace of them. We only know more about languages spoken around the Mediterranean. The fact that Lusitanian was clearly not Celtic and in some ways more Italic than Celtic already demonstrates to us that there were at least 3 waves of IE languages still spoken in Iberia by ~1 AD (that's more than 2000 years of possible linguistic replacements since Bell Beaker): a Proto-Italo-Celtic that would become Lusitanian; a Celtic that would become Celtiberian; and a Latin that would become Iberian Romance languages.

[MOESAN]

Funny about making of trees:
-Bernard Sergent (compiling others thoughts relatively recent) thinks archaic "Northwestern Old-Europeish" is not an early indifferenciated IE but rather a kind of "proto-Indo-Iranian"! Curiously he evocates Rhaetian as possibly related to it, but I don't know what kind of Rhaetian he is speaking about here.
-B.S. thinks also that genuine Illyrian did not go far farther north than today Albania, and could be considered as a dialect of a language which gave birth too to Mesapian and Albanian. At a bigger scale it was part of a group of Balkanic languages like Thracian, Dacian an others, rather satemised. The traits shared with Germanic could be linked to the supposed proximity (for a while) of proto-Germanics (already IE-ised) with people close to Illyrians at Lusatian times, if we rely on Henri Hubert, but all this is speculation.
the I-Ian hypothesis for "old west europeish" is interesting; we have one of the Saami Finnic substrata supposed to be an early partly satemised IE language - we have the CWC's who maybe could have spoken this old partly satemized language (look at their distribution in Norway where they seems having been pushed northwards by true Germanics)- we have Germanics which shows more grammatical and lexical ties with Baltic than with Celtic and even with Italic (closer to it than Celtic, in fact) - the supposed Indo-Iranian link could it reflect an old stage of proto-Satem dialects, the IEans of the North? It's discussed in Eurogenes : apparently the ties between Balto-Slavic and I-Ian are ancient and not the result of recent convergences. I personally think that the center of palatalization, motor of satemisation, is in Center and Eastern Europe, not farther North or South, and a continuum existed between Balto-Slavic, Thracian/Dacian & Cy and Indo-Iranian without to speak of lost dialects.
Only bits here. But I think the tree system doesn' exclude partial osmosis between neighbouring languages, and loans. Germanic language has a complicated making: not-IEan + contacts with a rather Satem language before true IEisation from some pan-Italic or Celto-Italic + contacts/ with Baltic and Central Europe (pseudo-"Illyrian"? with some "etruscan-like" tendancies?)
I think today languages forms can mistake us about their ancient proximities; at ancient stages IE dialects were closer one together and could easier exchange with others and modify themselves. There could be some porosity even between our "families".
Grammar and lexicon and phonetic can give us very different feelings about closeness.
&: contrary to what Sile said all the languages in Europe did not undergo a systematic palatalisation for their velars before front vowels.
&: Celtic seems older than Hallstatt and modern Greek is an adopted IE language by non IE folks and some others who were West-Anatolian IE speakers. ATW it underwent serious phonetical modifs.

[ratchet_fan]

The haplogroup correlations look suspiciously like those promulgated by the quack Carlos Quiles, where nearly all of the branches of the Indo-European family are in fact bastardized creoles and there was no united family. And also comes up with the absurd idea that R1a-M417 spoke Uralic, despite the fact that no majority R1a people speak a Uralic language today (and spare me the Hungarians, they are assimilated Slavs). My belief is that Proto-Indo-European was a creole of sort, but not its descendants. The parent dialects are a Northwest Caucasian language spoken by the R1b-L23 people coming up from Maykop and the, for lack of a better term, Aryan dialect spoken by the R1a-M417 people already in the Pontic forest-steppe. There was also some minor Uralic contact from the N1c Uralic speakers just to the north of the R1a tribes.

Carlos Quiles is a troll of the highest degree. He's obsessed with making Uralics a European population when that is far from the truth. He is also an R1b supremacist. He's a troll. Not sure why he's so obsessed with Indo-Europeans being R1b and Uralics being European given that he looks Mexican.

[Georges]

Thank you, Maciamo, for this! Well done! I also believe that linguistics and genetics must converge. When genetics didn't exist, linguistics were used to explain history. Now genetics can correct some of the errors of the past.

[MOESAN]

To come back to ancient posts, I think a group of IE very close western dialects has colonized Western Europe at the BB time. (I recall that for a lot of people, BB is not a completely homogenous phenomenon, and for myself, we are not sure the dominant Y-R1b-P312 descendants are the former BB potters). IE or IE-icised R1b-P312 found divers pops in divers proportions: it can explain some divergences in future languages here and there in this area + the isolation by distance has been at play, with more striking results when between dialects have been lost as we can imagine (I know "imagine" doesn't smell too much "science"). So the Ygorcs hypothesis for Gaelic being a cousin to proto-Celtic re-Celtised after is attractive enough to me, I was on the same "wave" of thinking). Italic dialects diverged from Celtic ones by isolation (later for P- forms ones), and seem to me showing some southern non-IE languages phonetic influences, as it occurred in Greek language.