The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the north of the Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and Greater Iran, with additional native branches found in regions such as Armenia, parts of the southern Indian subcontinent (Sri Lanka and the Maldives), 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-Iranian, Italic, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic), and four by fewer than fifteen million native speakers each (Hellenic, Albanoid, Armenian, 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 (). 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 and large parts Asia (Central, West and South). 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 Africa, Americas, 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.
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—published in the 20th century—in which he noted similarities between North Indian languages and Greek and Latin.
Another account was made by Filippo Sassetti, a merchant born in Florence in 1540, who travelled to the Indian subcontinent. Writing in 1585, he noted 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 among certain Asian and European languages and theorized that they were derived from a primitive common language that 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 not become widely known and did not stimulate further research.
Ottoman Turkish traveller Evliya Çelebi visited Vienna in 1665–1666 as part of a diplomatic mission and noted a few similarities between words in German and in Persian. Gaston Coeurdoux and others made observations of the same type. Coeurdoux made a thorough comparison of Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek conjugations in the late 1760s to suggest a relationship among them. Meanwhile, Mikhail Lomonosov compared different language groups, including Slavic, Baltic ("Kurlandic"), Iranian ("Medic"), Finnish, Chinese, "Hottentot" (Khoekhoe), and others, noting that related languages (including Latin, Greek, German, and Russian) must have separated in antiquity from common ancestors.M. V. Lomonosov (drafts for Russian Grammar, published 1755). In: Complete Edition, Moscow, 1952, vol. 7, pp. 652–659 : Представимъ долготу времени, которою сіи языки раздѣлились. ... Польской и россійской языкъ коль давно раздѣлились! Подумай же, когда курляндской! Подумай же, когда латинской, греч., нѣм., росс. О глубокая древность! [Imagine the depth of time when these languages separated! ... Polish and Russian separated so long ago! Now think how long ago [this happened to] Kurlandic! Think when [this happened to] Latin, Greek, German, and Russian! Oh, great antiquity!]
The hypothesis reappeared in 1786 when Sir William Jones first 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. Blench erroneously included Egyptian, Japanese, and Chinese in the Indo-European languages, while omitting Hindi. 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:
Thomas Young first used the term "Indo-European" in 1813, deriving it from the geographical extremes of the language family: from Western Europe to North India.In London Quarterly Review X/2 1813.; cf. A synonym is Indo-Germanic (Idg. or IdG.), specifying the family's southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches. This first appeared in French () in 1810 in the work of Conrad Malte-Brun; in most languages this term is now dated or less common than Indo-European, although in German remains the standard scientific term. A number of other synonymous terms have also been used.
Franz Bopp wrote in 1816 "On the conjugational system of the Sanskrit language compared with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic" and between 1833 and 1852 he wrote Comparative Grammar. This marks the beginning of Indo-European studies as an academic discipline. The classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics leads from this work to August Schleicher's 1861 Compendium and up to Karl Brugmann's Grundriss, published in the 1880s. Brugmann's neogrammarian reevaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussure's development of the laryngeal theory may be considered the beginning of "modern" Indo-European studies. The generation of Indo-Europeanists active in the last third of the 20th century (such as Calvert Watkins, Jochem Schindler, and Helmut Rix) developed a better understanding of morphology and of ablaut in the wake of Kuryłowicz's 1956 Apophony in Indo-European, who in 1927 wrote about the existence of the Hittite consonant ḫ. Kuryłowicz's discovery supported Ferdinand de Saussure's 1879 proposal of the existence of , elements de Saussure reconstructed to account for vowel length alternations in Indo-European languages. This led to the so-called laryngeal theory, a major step forward in Indo-European linguistics and a confirmation of de Saussure's theory.
Classification
The various subgroups of the Indo-European language family include ten major branches, listed below in alphabetical order: Albanian, attested from the 13th century; Proto-Albanian evolved from an ancient Paleo-Balkan language, traditionally thought to be Illyrian, or otherwise a totally unattested Balkan Indo-European language that was closely related to Illyrian and Messapic.In his latest book, Eric Hamp supports the thesis that the Illyrian language belongs to the Northwestern group, that the Albanian language is descended from Illyrian, and that Albanian is related to Messapic which is an earlier Illyrian dialect (). Anatolian, extinct by Late Antiquity, spoken in Anatolia, attested in isolated terms in Luwian/Hittite mentioned in Semitic Old Assyrian texts from the 20th and 19th centuries BC, Hittite texts from about 1650 BC. Among the text is the Anitta text in the Hittite language, which is also the oldest known text in an Indo-European language. It is dated to 1700 BCE. Armenian, attested from the early 5th century AD. It evolved from the Proto-Armenian language which, according to the Armenian hypothesis, developed in situ from the Proto-Indo-European language of the 3rd millennium BC.Gamkrelidze, Tamaz V.; Ivanov, Vyacheslav (1995). Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans: A Reconstruction and Historical Analysis of a Proto-Language and Proto-Culture. Part I: The Text. Part II: Bibliography, Indexes. Walter de Gruyter. .Haber, Marc; Mezzavilla, Massimo; Xue, Yali; Comas, David; Gasparini, Paolo; Zalloua, Pierre; Tyler-Smith, Chris (2015). "Genetic evidence for an origin of the Armenians from Bronze Age mixing of multiple populations". European Journal of Human Genetics. 24 (6): 931–936. bioRxiv 10.1101/015396. doi:10.1038/ejhg.2015.206. PMC 4820045. PMID 26486470. Balto-Slavic, believed by most Indo-EuropeanistsSuch as , , , and . to form a phylogenetic unit, while a minority ascribes similarities to prolonged language-contact. Slavic (from Proto-Slavic), attested from the 9th century AD (possibly earlier), earliest texts in Old Church Slavonic. Slavic languages include Bulgarian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Silesian, Kashubian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian (Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian), Sorbian, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn. Baltic, attested from the 14th century; although attested relatively recently, they retain many archaic features attributed to Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Living examples are Lithuanian and Latvian. Celtic (from Proto-Celtic), attested since the 6th century BC; Lepontic inscriptions date as early as the 6th century BC; Celtiberian from the 2nd century BC; Primitive Irish Ogham inscriptions from the 4th or 5th century AD, earliest inscriptions in Old Welsh from the 7th century AD. Modern Celtic languages include Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Scottish Gaelic, Irish and Manx.