Albanoid and other
Paleo-Balkan languages had their formative core in the
Balkans after the
Indo-European migrations in the region.
Indo-European diversification and dispersal 's splitting from Post-
Anatolian Indo-European (by Chang et al. 2015). This tree model is also supported by Hyllested & Joseph 2022, with the difference that they consider the splitting of
Armenian from
Graeco-Albanian instead of Albanian from
Graeco-Armenian. Although research is ongoing, in current phylogenetic
tree models of the
Indo-European language family, the IE dialect that gave rise to Albanian splits from "Post-Tocharian Indo-European", that is the residual Indo-European unity ("Core Indo-European") which remained after
Tocharian's splitting from "Post-
Anatolian Indo-European". The transition between the Basal IE and Core IE speech communities appears to have been marked by an economic shift from a mainly non-agricultural economy to a mixed
agro-
pastoral economy. The lack of evidence for agricultural practices in early, eastern
Yamnaya of the
Don-
Volga steppe does not offer a perfect archaeological proxy for the Core IE language community, rather western Yamnaya groups around or to the west of the
Dnieper River better reflect that archaeological proxy. The common stage between the Late
Proto-Indo-European dialects of Pre-Albanian, Pre-Armenian, and Pre-Greek, is considered to have occurred in the Late
Yamnaya period after the westward migrations of Early Yamnaya across the Pontic–Caspian steppe, also remaining in the western steppe for a prolonged period of time separated from the Proto-Indo-European dialects that later gave rise in Europe to the
Corded Ware and
Bell Beaker cultures.
Yamnaya steppe pastoralists apparently migrated into the Balkans about 3000 to 2500 BCE, and they soon admixed with the local populations, which resulted in a tapestry of various ancestry from which speakers of the Albanian and other Paleo-Balkan languages emerged. The Albanoid speech was among the Indo-European languages that replaced the
pre-Indo-European languages of the Balkans, which left traces of the Mediterranean-Balkan substratum. On the other hand,
Baltic and
Slavic, together with
Germanic, as well as possibly
Celtic and
Italic, apparently emerged on the territory of the
Corded Ware archaeological horizon of the late 4th and the 3rd millennium BCE. The distinction between the southern European languages (in particular Albanian and Greek) and the northern and western European languages (Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, and Italic) is further reflected by the frequently shared lexical items of northwest pre-Indo-European substratum among the latter languages. ==Classification==