Why should we spend time and energy reconstructing a proto-language like Indo-European?
Linguist J.P. Mallory asserts that at least some of the motivation behind efforts at linguistic reconstruction is a search for cultural identity. Language is the supreme vehicle of culture, and information about the ancient history of our ancestral language reveals us to ourselves. While many have maintained that the search for the PIE homeland is a waste of intellectual effort, or beyond the competence of the methodologies involved, the many scholars who have tackled the problem have ably evinced why they considered it important. The location of the homeland and the description of how the Indo-European languages spread is central to any explanation of how Europe became European. In a larger sense it is a search for the origins of western civilization (Journal of Indo-European Studies 1, 1973, 21f).
