Image: Wikimedia Commons

Proto-Indo-European

Proto-language of the Indo-European languages

Entityproto-language extinct language reconstructed languageQ37178

Also known as PIE · Proto-Indo-European language · PIE language

Instance of: proto-language
, extinct language
, reconstructed language
Subclass of: Indo-European
Founded: 4th millennium BCE
1
Sources
1.Stated in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language
View statement on Wikidata ↗

Overview

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · Read full article · Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European has been discovered; its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other proto-language. The majority of linguistic work during the 19th century was devoted to the reconstruction of PIE and its daughter languages, and many of the modern techniques of linguistic reconstruction were developed as a result.

Overview

All data

62 statements · 6% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations

Native label: unknown
Linguistic typology: fusional language
subject–object–verb
Followed by: Indo-European
Proto-Indo-Iranian
Proto-Balto-Slavic
Paleo-Germanic
Short name: PIE
ПИЕ
pIE
ΠΙΕ
ПИЕ
pie.
Script: none
Has grammatical case: nominative case
dative case
ablative case
genitive case
accusative case
vocative case
locative case
instrumental case
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allative case
Has grammatical gender: masculine
feminine
neuter
common
Follows: unknown
Proto-Nostratic nature of statement: hypothesis
Wikimedia language code: ine-pro used by: English Wiktionary
Indigenous to: Proto-Indo-Europeans

On other databases

23 identifiers linking Proto-Indo-European across the web's reference databases

Data quality

statements

externally sourced

Source last edited October 2, 2026. AIDB refreshes this page daily.

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AIDB. (2026). Proto-Indo-European (Q37178). Retrieved from https://aidb.si/e/proto-indo-european-Q37178