Radio Sunrise serves the West London Community of mixed races, Punjabi speakers and the midst of an English suburb. What could these two languages, Punjabi and English, have in common?

In fact, English and Punjabi, as well as other languages of Northern India like Hindi or Gudjurati are related. Something discovered by chance, two hundred years ago, by a multilingual English lawyer Sir William Jones.

He was a judge, he went out to India in 1783, but he studied languages, oriental languages, before he went, and when he got to India he became very interested and learned Sanskrit, which is the language of ancient India which was first written about 500 A.D. and, then, he realised he made a great discovery in that Sanskrit resembles in some way has relationships with Greek and Latin and other languages and he gave a very famous discourse in which he said that this was sprung for some common source.

It’s surprising that no one spotted the resemblances earlier. Take the numbers again. For example, the Sanskrit, on the right, bears a strong resemblance to Latin and Greek, on the left; but while one, two and three are obvious, four and five need a closer look to spot the connection.

Linguists have discovered rules that govern how sounds and different languages are related. Look at the words for four: this is one of many examples where a word beginning with ‘q’ in Latin say is similar to a Greek word beginning with ‘t’, and a Sanskrit word beginning with ‘k’. These sound correspondences can overview how apparently unrelated languages are members of the same family.

The question is: How can you tell that the languages you’re looking at reflect the single original language and, therefore, form a family? The only way you can do that is by finding systematic similarities between these languages in every area of their grammar similarities and their sound similarities, in their inflections similarities, in the syntax of the language and so forth, and the similarities have to be very precise and they have to be interlocking for the assertion that these languages form a family or to be believable. You take a look at an English word like ‘tooth’ and see that in Hindi is ‘dant’ and that by itself that doesn’t mean very much; but you take a look at English ‘ten’ which shows up in Hindi as ‘das’ and you see the same pattern emerging, you’ve got an initial ‘t’ in English and an initial ‘d’ in Hindi. When you find that the word ‘two’, the numeral, in English shows up in Hindi as ‘do’ you’ve got once again an initial ‘t’ in English and an initial ‘d’ in Hindi, you begin to think that perhaps this is not an accident.

Linguists have now established that a whole range of languages, stretching from Iceland to India, form one family called Indo-European.

We can ever reconstruct an earlier ancestor of these languages, Proto-Indo-European.