The Indo-European languages reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages include 150 languages spoken by about three billion people, including most of the major language families of Europe and western Asia, which belong to a single superfamily. Popular languages in this superfamily include English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Russian, Farsi, Hindi, and Urdu.

The hypothesis that this was so was first proposed by Sir William Jones, who noticed similarities between four of the oldest languages known in his time, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Persian. Systematic comparison of these and other old languages conducted by Franz Bopp supported this theory. In the 19th century, scholars used to call the group "Indo-Germanic languages" or sometimes "Aryan." However when it became apparent that the connection is relevant to most of Europe's languages, the name was expanded to Indo-European. An example of this was the strong similarity discovered between Sanskrit and olden spoken dialects of Lithuanian.

The common ancestral (reconstructed) language is called Proto-Indo-European (PIE). There is disagreement as to the geographic location (the so-called "Urheimat"), where it originated from, with Armenia and the area to the north or west of the Black Sea being prime examples of proposed candidates.

The various subgroups of the Indo-European family include:

• Indo-Iranian languages
• Italic languages (including Latin and its descendants, the Romance languages)
• Germanic languages (including English)
• Celtic languages
• Baltic languages
• Slavic languages
• Albanian language, which is often placed with several extinct languages in the Illyrian languages subgroup.
• Thracian language (extinct)
• Dacian language (extinct)
• Phrygian language (extinct language of ancient Phrygia)
• Anatolian languages (extinct, most notable was the language of the Hittites)
• Tocharian languages (extinct tongues of Tocharians)
• Greek languages
• Armenian language

(cf. Satem and Centum languages)

Most spoken European languages belong to the Indo-European superfamily. There are, however, language families which do not. The Finno-Ugric language family, which includes Hungarian, Estonian, Finnish and the languages of the Sami, is an example. The Caucasian language family is another. The Basque language is unusual in that it does not appear to be related to any known languages.

The Maltese language and Turkish are two examples of languages spoken in Europe which have definite non-European origins. Turkish being Turkic, and Maltese being largely derived from Arabic

It has been proposed that Indo-European languages are part of the hypothetical Nostratic language superfamily; this theory is controversial.

See also

• Language families and languages
• August Schleicher, (A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages) (1861/62)
• List of Indo-European roots

External Links

• Indo-European Roots, from the American Heritage Dictionary.
• Indo-European Documentation Centre at the University of Texas
• Say something in Proto-Indo-European (by Geoffrey Sampson)

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