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.