Protolanguage

A protolanguage or reconstructed language is the probable reconstruction of the original language of a group of languages, be it a branch or a family, on the basis of coincidences and features common to said family of languages that do not constitute innovations or loans.

Reconstruction of phonology

This reconstruction is carried out by means of the comparison of languages or the comparative method of said group applying the methods of historical linguistics. Normally the reconstruction process begins by reconstructing the phonetic-phonological level of the mother tongue, which is done in three stages:

1. Lists of cognates are established, i.e. words with identical or very similar meaning and that have near or related phonetic forms through phonetic laws.
2. Regular correlations are established between sounds in the form of phonetic laws.
3. For each regular correlation, the fonema or fonemas that could have been the originals in the protolengua and that by different regular evolutions gave rise to different sounds (the regularity of evolution is what would explain the occurrence of regular correlations and phonetic laws).

Naturally, this procedure cannot make us forget the existence of phonetic laws that relate very different sounds or segments to each other, such as the famous cases (Meillet) existing between Armenian and the other Indo-European languages. Moreover, this type of inexplicable correspondences by mere chance are preferred by comparatists for their work in this section, just as in morphology shared irregularities are very relevant.

Likelihood of reconstruction

It is important to understand that usually the reconstruction is applied to a language that stopped being spoken a long time ago, and is generally mostly unknown, that is, there are no inscriptions or written references. Said reconstruction process tries to guess what was the path followed in the evolution of the language, and to follow it in the opposite direction.

Historically, the first reconstructed proto-language was Proto-Indo-European or Common Indo-European, the mother tongue that would have given rise to the Romance, Germanic, Celtic, Baltic, Greek, Slavic and Indo-Iranian languages, among others. This was done at the end of the 19th century, and then the comparative method acquired a fully scientific character (induction + deduction). Since then dozens of reconstructions of other protolanguages have been made. Nevertheless, internal reconstruction can and should sometimes be applied to the result of the comparison (i.e., to the protolanguage of the first degree) or to different stages of the prehistory of particular languages, not only to discover new processes or forms, but to establish relative chronologies between them.

Words reconstructed on the basis of reliable linguistic evidence are preceded by *.

Reconstructed Protolanguages

The following list contains links to some reconstructed proto-languages for which there are Wikipedia articles: