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The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent.
- † indicates this branch of the language family is extinct
- Proto-Indo-European
- One of the world's primary language families
- Overview
- Languages of the family
- Anatolian
- Indo-Iranian
- Greek
- Italic
- Germanic
- Armenian
- Tocharian
- Celtic
Indo-European languages, family of languages spoken in most of Europe and areas of European settlement and in much of Southwest and South Asia. The term Indo-Hittite is used by scholars who believe that Hittite and the other Anatolian languages are not just one branch of Indo-European but rather a branch coordinate with all the rest put together; t...
The well-attested languages of the Indo-European family fall fairly neatly into the 10 main branches listed below; these are arranged according to the age of their oldest sizable texts.
Now extinct, Anatolian languages were spoken during the 1st and 2nd millennia bce in what is presently Asian Turkey and northern Syria. By far the best-known Anatolian language is Hittite, the official language of the Hittite empire, which flourished in the 2nd millennium. Very few Hittite texts were known before 1906, and their interpretation as I...
Indo-Iranian comprises two main subbranches, Indo-Aryan (Indic) and Iranian. Indo-Aryan languages have been spoken in what is now northern and central India and Pakistan since before 1000 bce. Aside from a very poorly known dialect spoken in or near northern Iraq during the 2nd millennium bce, the oldest record of an Indo-Aryan language is the Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda, the oldest of the sacred scriptures of India, dating roughly from 1000 bce. Examples of modern Indo-Aryan languages are Hindi, Bengali, Sinhalese (spoken in Sri Lanka), and the many dialects of Romany, the language of the Roma.
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Iranian languages were spoken in the 1st millennium bce in present-day Iran and Afghanistan and also in the steppes to the north, from modern Hungary to East (Chinese) Turkistan (now Xinjiang). The only well-known ancient varieties of Iranian languages are Avestan, the sacred language of the Zoroastrians (Parsis), and Old Persian, the official language of Darius I (ruled 522–486 bce) and Xerxes I (486–465 bce) and their successors. Among the modern Iranian languages are Persian (Fārsī), Pashto (Afghan), Kurdish, and Ossetic.
Greek, despite its numerous dialects, has been a single language throughout its history. It has been spoken in Greece since at least 1600 bce and, in all probability, since the end of the 3rd millennium bce. The earliest texts are the Linear B tablets, some of which may date from as far back as 1400 bce (the date is disputed) and some of which certainly date to 1200 bce. This material, very sparse and difficult to interpret, was not identified as Greek until 1952. The Homeric epics—the Iliad and the Odyssey, probably dating from the 8th century bce—are the oldest texts of any bulk.
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The principal language of the Italic group is Latin, originally the speech of the city of Rome and the ancestor of the modern Romance languages: Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and so on. The earliest Latin inscriptions apparently date from the 6th century bce, with literature beginning in the 3rd century. Scholars are not in agreem...
In the middle of the 1st millennium bce, Germanic tribes lived in southern Scandinavia and northern Germany. Their expansions and migrations from the 2nd century bce onward are largely recorded in history. The oldest Germanic language of which much is known is the Gothic of the 4th century ce. Other languages include English, German, Dutch, Danish,...
Armenian, like Greek, is a single language. Speakers of Armenian are recorded as being in what now constitutes eastern Turkey and Armenia as early as the 6th century bce, but the oldest Armenian texts date from the 5th century ce.
The Tocharian languages, now extinct, were spoken in the Tarim Basin (in present-day northwestern China) during the 1st millennium ce. Two distinct languages are known, labeled A (East Tocharian, or Turfanian) and B (West Tocharian, or Kuchean). One group of travel permits for caravans can be dated to the early 7th century, and it appears that othe...
Celtic languages were spoken in the last centuries before the Common Era (also called the Christian Era) over a wide area of Europe, from Spain and Britain to the Balkans, with one group (the Galatians) even in Asia Minor. Very little of the Celtic of that time and the ensuing centuries has survived, and this branch is known almost entirely from th...
May 5, 2014 · The Indo-European languages have a large number of branches: Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, Greek, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Armenian, Tocharian, Balto-Slavic and Albanian. Anatolian. This branch of languages was predominant in the Asian portion of Turkey and some areas in northern Syria. The most famous of these languages is Hittite.
- Cristian Violatti
Jan 19, 2013 · Partial tree of Indo-European languages. Branches are in order of first attestation; those to the left are Centum, those to the right are Satem. Languages in red are extinct.
Oct 25, 2023 · Ever since the discovery, over two centuries ago, that these languages belong to the same family, philologists have worked to reconstruct the first Indo-European language (known as...
- Kim Schulte
Thomas Olander. Edited by. Thomas Olander. Chapter. Figures. Save PDF. Summary. The chapter provides a general introduction to the book, presenting the background and the overall framework. It assesses the relationship between traditional linguistic phylogenetics and more recent computational approaches.
Indo-European languages - Proto-IE, Family Tree, Subgroups: By comparing the recorded Indo-European languages, especially the most ancient ones, much of the parent language from which they are descended can be reconstructed. This reconstructed parent language is sometimes called simply Indo-European, but in this article the term Proto-Indo ...
