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At the beginning of the 20th century, the Danish linguist Holger Pedersen introduced a new classification of languages that he called Nostratic, after the Latin for "ours", implying a more inclusive, shared heritage. There is a great deal of linguistic evidence that the Indo-European language family forms part of a larger grouping, a "macrofamily" made up of several already-recognized language families: (Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian and Kartvelian. By taking proto-language reconstruction several thousand years further back in time, Nostratic linguists found etymological roots shared in common among all these language families.

The reconstruction of Nostratic was first published in the 1960s in Russia by the pioneering linguists Aron Dolgopolsky and Vladimir Illich-Svitych. More recently, a second wave of research is revitalizing the field.

Tower of Babel is a research project in the Jewish University in Moscow that aims to trace the origin of the world's present-day languages to a dozen or so protolanguages, presumably spoken eleven to fourteen thousand years ago; perhaps, even to the original "language of all the earth."