I primarily based this project on the most recent phylogenetic statistical analysis from Chang et al. 2015 (University of California, Berkeley) which charts the divergence of the Indo-European language family

Link to .pdf file of the paper (you can find their tree on Figure 2)

Link to the wikipedia article about the Indo-European language family

I expanded Chang et al.'s tree by including extinct languages, and by charting the geographic spread of languages (encoded in the colour of each branch). Many areas are simplified for the sake of making it readable. Uncertainty is indicated by dotted lines and question marks.

My entirely arbitrary rule of thumb for including a language or not was if it had ~2 million native speakers, or I sometimes included obscure/minor languages if they had an interesting history that caught my attention (e.g Ossettian). Pls don't @ me complaining about the lack of Faroese!

Languages that belong to different language families are obviously not included. These include: Hungarian, Finnish, Basque, the Dravidian language family of south India, and the Semitic language group of Africa and the Middle East

I am not a paleolinguist, so there are likely errors and oversights. I just wanted to learn about a fascinating topic and produce something along the way to inspire others to do their own research. You are free to download/print do whatever you want with this poster! If you want the raw .svg file, just DM me.

Cool graph, but do not see Gaelic. Isn't that an old language in Scotland?

Grouped within Irish. There's about 40 thousand languages and dialects not represented and that's just the extant ones. Relationship between Scottish and Irish is comparable to somewhat late-ish latin and arbitrary early Romance language. Distinction can, and has been made, but it isn't useful in every situation.

Kortland argues that slavic was the last one to sprung off indo-aryan tho. The Leiden guys seem to be pretty keen on indo-uralic as well, so I don't really know how to process it.

This is cool, but it might be easier to read if you rotated it 90 degrees?

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Huh, so I wasn't the only one rotating my phone.

Well I have a 27" monitor so that was not a possibility. /s

I cannot include every Indo-European language, there are 445

Unfortunately a language with 50,000 speakers is not going to make the cut.

So much cool work and you misspelled Portuguese. 😊

I dont think Germanic and Celtic have a common ancestor rather than Germanic and Balto Slavic (if such thing existed)

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nice, but a typo in "Ukranian" – should be "Ukrainian"

They’re both Indo-European language branches, so they must have had a common ancestor at some point.

Shouldn't Greek be closer to the rest of European branches than the Indo-Aryan branch?

that is not what this statistical analysis recovered

the paleo-balkan branch is thought to be one of the oldest and most archaic branches of indo-european

The exact position of Germanic is controversial and really hard to pin down.