Indo-European Family Languages

1. Despite medieval invasions by Eurasian nomads, a group to which the Proto-Indo-Europeans had once belonged, Indo-European expansion reached another peak in the early modern period with the dramatic increase in the population of the Indian subcontinent and European expansionism throughout the globe during the Age of Discovery, as well as the continued replacement and assimilation of surrounding non-Indo-European languages and peoples due to increased state centralization and nationalism. These trends compounded throughout the modern period due to the general global population growth and the results of European colonization of the Western Hemisphere and Oceania, leading to an explosion in the number of Indo-European speakers as well as the territories inhabited by them.

2. Despite being unaware of their common linguistic origin, diverse groups of Indo-European speakers continued to culturally dominate and often replace the indigenous languages of the western two-thirds of Eurasia. By the beginning of the Common Era, Indo-European peoples controlled almost the entirety of this area: the Celts western and central Europe, the Romans southern Europe, the Germanic peoples northern Europe, the Slavs eastern Europe, the Iranian peoples most of western and central Asia and parts of eastern Europe, and the Indo-Aryan peoples in the Indian subcontinent, with the Tocharians inhabiting the Indo-European frontier in western China. By the medieval period, only the Semitic, Dravidian, Caucasian, and Uralic languages, and the language isolate Basque remained of the (relatively) indigenous languages of Europe and the western half of Asia.

3. Languages Of The Family

3.1. The well-attested languages of the Indo-European family fall fairly neatly into the 10 main branches below, these are arranged according to the oldest age sizable texts.

3.2. Anatolian

3.3. 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.

3.4. Indo-Iranian

3.5. 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 Indo-European was not generally accepted until after 1915; the integration of Hittite data into Indo-European comparative grammar was, therefore, one of the principal developments of Indo-European studies in the 20th century. The oldest Hittite texts date from the 17th century BCE, the latest from approximately 1200 BCE.

3.6. Greek

3.7. 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.

3.8. Italic

3.9. 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 agreement as to how many other ancient languages of Italy and Sicily belong in the same branch as Latin.

3.10. Germanic

3.11. 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, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic.

3.12. Armenian

3.13. 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.

3.14. Tocharian

3.15. 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 other texts date from the same or from neighbouring centuries. These languages became known to scholars only in the first decade of the 20th century. They have been less important for Indo-European studies than Hittite has been, partly because their testimony about the Indo-European parent language is obscured by 2,000 more years of change and partly because Tocharian testimony fits fairly well with that of the previously known non-Anatolian languages.

3.16. Celtic

3.17. 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 the Insular Celtic languages—Irish, Welsh, and others—spoken in and near the British Isles, as recorded from the 8th century CE onward.

3.18. Balto-Slavic

3.19. The grouping of Baltic and Slavic into a single branch is somewhat controversial, but the exclusively shared features outweigh the divergences. At the beginning of the Common Era, Baltic and Slavic tribes occupied a large area of eastern Europe, east of the Germanic tribes and north of the Iranians, including much of present-day Poland and the states of Belarus, Ukraine, and westernmost Russia. The Slavic area was in all likelihood relatively small, perhaps centred in what is now southern Poland. But in the 5th century CE the Slavs began expanding in all directions. By the end of the 20th century Slavic languages were spoken throughout much of eastern Europe and northern Asia. The Baltic-speaking area, however, contracted, and by the end of the 20th century Baltic languages were confined to Lithuania and Latvia.

4. Evolution

4.1. The proposed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian became certain enough to establish its relationship to PIE. Using the method of internal reconstruction, an earlier stage, called Pre-Proto-Indo-European, has been proposed.

4.2. The diversification of the parent language into the attested branches of daughter languages is historically unattested. The timeline of the evolution of the various daughter languages, on the other hand, is mostly undisputed, quite regardless of the question of Indo-European origins. Using a mathematical analysis borrowed from evolutionary biology, Don Ringe and Tandy Warnow propose the following evolutionary tree of Indo-European branches:

4.3. Pre-Anatolian (before 3500 BC) Pre-Tocharian Pre-Italic and Pre-Celtic (before 2500 BC) Pre-Armenian and Pre-Greek (after 2500 BC) Proto-Indo-Iranian (2000 BC) Pre-Germanic and Pre-Balto-Slavic, proto-Germanic c. 500 BC

4.4. David Anthony proposes the following sequence: Pre-Anatolian (4200 BC) Pre-Tocharian (3700 BC) Pre-Germanic (3300 BC) Pre-Italic and Pre-Celtic (3000 BC) Pre-Armenian (2800 BC) Pre-Balto-Slavic (2800 BC) Pre-Greek (2500 BC)

4.5. Important languages for reconstruction

4.6. In reconstructing the history of the Indo-European languages and the form of the Proto-Indo-European language, some languages have been of particular importance. These generally include the ancient Indo-European languages that are both well-attested and documented at an early date, although some languages from later periods are important if they are particularly linguistically conservative (most notably, Lithuanian). Early poetry is of special significance because of the rigid poetic meter normally employed, which makes it possible to reconstruct a number of features (e.g. vowel length) that were either unwritten or corrupted in the process of transmission down to the earliest extant written manuscripts.

4.7. Most noticeable of all: Vedic Sanskrit (c. 1500–500 BC). This language is unique in that its source documents were all composed orally, and were passed down through oral tradition (shakha schools) for c. 2,000 years before ever being written down. The oldest documents are all in poetic form; oldest and most important of all is the Rigveda (c. 1500 BC). Ancient Greek (c. 750–400 BC). Mycenaean Greek (c. 1450 BC) is the oldest recorded form, but its value is lessened by the limited material, restricted subject matter, and highly ambiguous writing system. More important is Ancient Greek, documented extensively beginning with the two Homeric poems (the Iliad and the Odyssey, c. 750 BC). Hittite (c. 1700–1200 BC). This is the earliest-recorded of all Indo-European languages, and highly divergent from the others due to the early separation of the Anatolian languages from the remainder. It possesses some highly archaic features found only fragmentarily, if at all, in other languages. At the same time, however, it appears to have undergone many early phonological and grammatical changes which, combined with the ambiguities of its writing system, hinder its usefulness somewhat.

4.8. Sound changes

4.9. As the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language broke up, its sound system diverged as well, changing according to various sound laws evidenced in the daughter languages.

4.10. PIE is normally reconstructed with a complex system of 15 stop consonants, including an unusual three-way phonation (voicing) distinction between voiceless, voiced and "voiced aspirated" (i.e. breathy voiced) stops, and a three-way distinction among velar consonants (k-type sounds) between "palatal" ḱ ǵ ǵh, "plain velar" k g gh and labiovelar kʷ gʷ gʷh. (The correctness of the terms palatal and plain velar is disputed; see Proto-Indo-European phonology.) All daughter languages have reduced the number of distinctions among these sounds, often in divergent ways.

4.11. Various further changes affected consonants in the middle or end of a word:

4.12. The voiced stops resulting from the sound shift were softened to voiced fricatives (or perhaps the sound shift directly generated fricatives in these positions).

4.13. Verner's law also turned some of the voiceless fricatives resulting from the sound shift into voiced fricatives or stops. This is why the t in Latin centum ends up as d in hund(red) rather than the expected th.

4.14. Most remaining h sounds disappeared, while remaining f and th became voiced. For example, Latin decem ends up as ten with no h in the middle (but note taíhun "ten" in Gothic, an archaic Germanic language). Similarly, the words seven and have have a voiced v (compare Latin septem, capere), while father and mother have a voiced th, although not spelled differently (compare Latin pater, māter).

5. Today, Indo-European languages are spoken by 3.2 billion native speakers across all inhabited continents,[60] the largest number by far for any recognised language family. Of the 20 languages with the largest numbers of native speakers according to Ethnologue, 10 are Indo-European: Spanish, English, Hindustani, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Punjabi, German, French, and Marathi, accounting for over 1.7 billion native speakers.[61] Additionally, hundreds of millions of persons worldwide study Indo-European languages as secondary or tertiary languages, including in cultures which have completely different language families and historical backgrounds—there are between 600 million[62] and one billion[63] L2 learners of English alone.

6. The largest of which are the Indo-Iranian, Germanic, Romance, and Balto-Slavic groups. The most populous individual languages within them are Spanish, English, Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu), Portuguese, Bengali, Punjabi, and Russian, each with over 100 million speakers. German, French, Marathi, Italian, and Persian have more than 50 million each. In total, 46% of the world's population (3.2 billion) speaks an Indo-European language as a first language, by far the highest of any language family.

7. The Indo-European languages are a large language family native to western Eurasia. It comprises most of the languages of Europe together with those of the northern Indian Subcontinent and the Iranian Plateau. A few of these languages, such as English and Spanish, have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across all continents.

8. Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families: