"The vast interior of Eurasia is a linguistic spread zone—a genetic and typological bottleneck where many genetic lines go extinct, structural types tend to converge, a single language or language family spreads out over a broad territorial range, and one language family replaces another over a large range every few millennia. The linguistic geography of the central and western grasslands, from at least the Neolithic until early modern times, has consisted of an overall westward trajectory of language spreads... The central Eurasian spread zone... was part of a standing pattern whereby languages were drawn into the spread zone, spread westward, and were eventually succeeded by the next spreading family."
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Johanna Nichols, in Archaeology and Language, Vol. I, ed. Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs (Routledge, 1997), quoted by S. Talageri, The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis (New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 2000)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages
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Indo-European languages
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