Linguistic homeland

In historical linguistics, the homeland or Urheimat (/ˈʊərhaɪmɑːt/ OOR-hye-maht, from German ur- 'original' and Heimat 'home') of a proto-language is the region in which it was spoken before splitting into different daughter languages.

Next to internal linguistic evidence, the reconstruction of a prehistoric homeland makes use of a variety of disciplines, including archaeology and archaeogenetics.

This vocabulary – especially terms for flora and fauna – can provide clues for the geographical and ecological environment in which the proto-language was spoken.

An estimate for the time-depth of the proto-language is necessary in order to account for prehistorical changes in climate and the distribution of flora and fauna.

This assumption is often reasonable and useful, but it is by no means a logical necessity, as languages are well known to be susceptible to areal change such as substrate or superstrate influence.

Over a sufficient period of time, in the absence of evidence of intermediary steps in the process, it may be impossible to observe linkages between languages that have a shared Urheimat: given enough time, natural language change will obliterate any meaningful linguistic evidence of a common genetic source.

[6] For example, the languages of the New World are believed to be descended from a relatively "rapid" peopling of the Americas (relative to the duration of the Upper Paleolithic) within a few millennia (roughly between 20,000 and 15,000 years ago),[7] but their genetic relationship has become completely obscured over the more than ten millennia which have passed between their separation and their first written record in the early modern period.

[8] The Urheimaten reconstructed using the methods of comparative linguistics typically estimate separation times dating to the Neolithic or later.

These languages would have spread with the early human migrations of the first "peopling of the world", but they are no longer amenable to linguistic reconstruction.