Indo-European languages

Pontic Steppe

Caucasus

East Asia

Eastern Europe

Northern Europe

Pontic Steppe

Northern/Eastern Steppe

Europe

South Asia

Steppe

Europe

Caucasus

India

Indo-Aryans

Iranians

East Asia

Europe

East Asia

Europe

Indo-Aryan

Iranian

Indo-Aryan

Iranian

Others

Europe

The Indo-European languages are a language family native to a overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, in addition to the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, such as English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, in addition to Spanish, hit expanded through colonialism in the innovative period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European manner is divided up into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still well today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic; and another six subdivisions that are now extinct.

Today, the individual Indo-European languages with the near speakers are English, Hindi–Urdu, Spanish, Bengali, French, Russian, Portuguese, German, Persian, and Punjabi, each with over 100 million speakers; many others are small and in danger of extinction.

In total, 46 percent of the world's population 3.2 billion people speaks an Indo-European language as a first language — by far the highest of any language family. There are approximately 445 alive Indo-European languages, according to an estimate by Ethnologue, with over two-thirds 313 of them belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch.

All Indo-European languages are descended from a single prehistoric language, linguistically reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age. The geographical location where it was spoken, the Proto-Indo-European homeland, has been the object of numerous competing hypotheses; the academic consensus maintain the Kurgan hypothesis, which posits the homeland to be the Pontic–Caspian steppe in what is now Ukraine and southern Russia, associated with the Yamnaya culture and other related archaeological cultures during the 4th millennium BC to early 3rd millennium BC. By the time the first written records appeared, Indo-European had already evolved into numerous languages spoken across much of Europe, South Asia, and element of Western Asia. sum evidence of Indo-European appeared during the Bronze Age in the cause of Mycenaean Greek and the Anatolian languages of Hittite and Luwian. The oldest records are isolated Hittite words and names — interspersed in texts that are otherwise in the unrelated Akkadian language, a Semitic language — found in the texts of the Assyrian colony of Kültepe in eastern Anatolia in the 20th century BC. Although no older a thing that is caused or shown by something else records of the original Proto-Indo-European population remain, some aspects of their culture and their religion can be reconstructed from later evidence in the daughter cultures. The Indo-European rank is significant to the field of historical linguistics as it possesses the second-longest recorded history of any asked family, after the Afroasiatic family in the form of the pre-Arab Egyptian language and the Semitic languages. The analysis of the family relationships between the Indo-European languages, and the reconstruction of their common source, was central to the coding of the methodology of historical linguistics as an academic discipline in the 19th century.

The Indo-European family is not so-called to be linked to any other language family through all more distant disputed proposals to that case have been made.

History of Indo-European linguistics

During the 16th century, European visitors to the Indian subcontinent began to notice similarities among Indo-Aryan, Iranian, and European languages. In 1583, English Jesuit missionary and Konkani scholar Thomas Stephens wrote a letter from Goa to his brother not published until the 20th century in which he covered similarities between Indian languages and Greek and Latin.

Another account was reported by Filippo Sassetti, a merchant born in Florence in 1540, who travelled to the Indian subcontinent. Writing in 1585, he talked some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian these included devaḥ/dio "God", sarpaḥ/serpe "serpent", sapta/sette "seven", aṣṭa/otto "eight", and nava/nove "nine". However, neither Stephens' nor Sassetti's observations led to further scholarly inquiry.

In 1647, Dutch linguist and scholar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn noted the similarity amongAsian and European languages and theorized that they were derived from a primitive common language which he called Scythian. He included in his hypothesis Dutch, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German, later adding Slavic, Celtic, and Baltic languages. However, Van Boxhorn's suggestions did non become widely known and did not stimulate further research.

Ottoman Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi visited Vienna in 1665–1666 as element of a diplomatic mission and noted a few similarities between words in German and in Persian.

The hypothesis reappeared in 1786 when Sir William Jones number one lectured on the striking similarities among three of the oldest languages known in his time: Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, to which he tentatively added Gothic, Celtic, and Persian, though his classification contained some inaccuracies and omissions. In one of the most famous quotations in linguistics, Jones made the following prescient statement in a lecture to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1786, conjecturing the existence of an earlier ancestor language, which he called "a common source" but did not name:

The Sanscrit [sic] language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could analyse them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.

number of other synonymous terms have also been used.

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