Concept

Indo-European languages

Overview

The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the north of the Indian subcontinent, most of the European continent, and the Iranian plateau, with additional native branches found in regions such as parts of Central Asia (e.g., Tajikistan and Afghanistan), southern Indian subcontinent (Sri Lanka and the Maldives), Armenia, and even stretching as far as to mainland Southeast Asia (Rohingya language in Myanmar). Historically, Indo-European languages were also spoken in Anatolia and Northwestern China. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches, of which eight are still spoken: four by hundreds of millions of native speakers each (Indo-Iranic, Italic, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic), and four by fewer than fifteen million native speakers each (Hellenic, Albanic, Armenic, and Celtic). Two major branches are extinct (Anatolian and Tocharian), as are a number of other Indo-European languages.

Today the individual Indo-European languages with the most native speakers are Spanish, Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu), English, Portuguese, Bengali, Punjabi, Russian, Marathi, German, French, and Persian; many others spoken by smaller groups are in danger of extinction. Over 3.4 billion people (42% of the global population) speak an Indo-European language as a first language—by far the most of any language family. There are about 446 living Indo-European languages, according to an estimate by Ethnologue, of which 313 belong to the Indo-Iranian branch.

All Indo-European languages are descended from a single prehistoric language, linguistically reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime during the Neolithic or early Bronze Age (c. 3300 – c. 1200 BC). The geographical location where it was spoken, the Proto-Indo-European homeland, has been the object of many competing hypotheses; the academic consensus supports 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 and early 3rd millennia BC.

By the time the first written records appeared, Indo-European had already evolved into numerous languages, spoken across much of Europe, Central, West and South Asia. Some European languages of this family—English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Dutch—have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across America, Oceania and North Asia.

Written evidence of Indo-European appeared during the Bronze Age in the form 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 texts of the Assyrian colony of Kültepe in eastern Anatolia dating to the 20th century BC. Although no older written 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 family is significant to the field of historical linguistics as it possesses the second-longest recorded history of any known family after Egyptian and the Semitic languages, which belong to the Afroasiatic language family. The analysis of the family relationships between the Indo-European languages, and the reconstruction of their common source, was central to the development of the methodology of historical linguistics as an academic discipline in the 19th century.

The current academic consensus in the field of linguistics does not accept any genetic relationships of the Indo-European language family with other language families, although several disputed hypotheses propose such relations.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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Great inundations or earthquakes surrounded inhabited districts with water or precipices, portions of the continent were by revolutions of the globe torn off and split into islands. It is obvious that among men thus collected, and forced to live together, a common idiom must have started up much sooner, than among those who freely wandered through the forests of the main land. Thus it is very possible that the…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind
Close in meaning to Indo-European languages; the term itself is not named.
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This is indicated primarily by the fact that these languages lack what we would call grammatical categories. As regards this point, Westermann's grammar of the Ewe language is in entire agreement with the much earlier results which Steinthal reached in his investigation of the Manda language, which is also of the Soudan region. These languages consist of monosyllabic words which follow one another in direct…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
States what Indo-European languages is.
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Meanwhile from other roots there are being evolved other such tribes, until there results a language of some sixty thousand or more unlike words, signifying as many unlike objects, qualities, acts. Yet another way in which language in general advances from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, is in the multiplication of languages. Whether all languages have grown from one stock, or whether, as some philologists…
Herbert Spencer, Essays
Close in meaning to Indo-European languages; the term itself is not named.
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Philosophers who discussed Indo-European languages

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Ithkuil

Place in the tradition

Part of Ancient history.

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