About Indo- European Languages:
- The Indo-European Languages are a family of related languages that today are widely spoken in the Americas, Europe, and also Western and Southern Asia.
- 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: Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and Persian.
- The common ancestral (reconstructed) language is called Proto-Indo-European (PIE), which is no longer spoken.
- There is disagreement as to the geographic location 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 Indo-European family of languages is the second-oldest in the world, only behind the Afroasiatic family (which includes the languages of ancient Egypt and early Semitic languages).
- It has the largest number of speakers of all language families as well as the widest dispersion around the world.
- The various subgroups of the Indo-European family include:
- Indo-Iranian languages (includes Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Persian)
- Italic languages (including Latin and its descendants, the Romance languages)
- Germanic languages
- Celtic languages
- Baltic languages
- Slavic languages
- Illyrian languages (extinct)
- Albanian language (and extinct cousins)
- Anatolian languages (extinct; most notable was the language of the Hittites)
- Tocharian languages (extinct tongues of Tocharians)
- Greek language
- Armenian language
- Some of the most commonly spoken Indo-European Languages in the modern world are Spanish, English, Hindustani, Portuguese, Russian, Punjabi, and Bengali.
