Proto-Indo-European society

Proto-Indo-European refers to the reconstructed ancestor language common to all Indo-European languages. It is therefore primarily a linguistic concept, not an ethnic, social or cultural one, and there is no direct evidence of the nature of Proto-Indo-European 'society'. Much depends on the unsettled Indo-European homeland debate as to where and when this common ancestor language was spoken. All interpretations of whatever aspects this society may have had, thus including all those reported here, are therefore only inferences, not established facts, using three main approaches.

• Some interpretations are based on archaeology, but those rest on the assumption that one of the homeland hypotheses is in fact correct.
• Another approach uses the comparative analysis of historically known societies speaking languages of the Indo-European family; it, too, is widely seen as questionable, including even the principal tenet, the Trifunctional hypothesis.
• Linguistic reconstruction can identify words (those cited *thus on this page, with a preceding asterisk) which formed part of the vocabulary of the Proto-Indo-European language. These are reconstructed on the basis of sound laws, which however, are not paralleled by any 'meaning laws'. Exactly what these terms may have referred to at the stage of Proto-Indo-European is therefore less certain. The technique of inferring culture from such reconstructions, known as linguistic palaeontology, is thus open to criticism, and the same word often has multiple different interpretations.

What follows in this page are interpretations based only on the assumption of the Kurgan hypothesis of Indo-European origins, and are by no means universally accepted.