The Indo-European Family of Languages

Home > ... > Literature and the Arts > Language, Linguistics, and Literary Terms > Language and Linguistics > ...

Essential reading Compare
side-by-side The Oxford Pocket Dictionary ... World Encyclopedia The Columbia Encyclopedia, ...

The Indo-European Family of Languages

Asterisk indicates a dead language.

The Indo-European Family of Languages

Subfamily	Group	Subgroup	Languages and Principal Dialects

Anatolian			Hieroglypic Hittite , Hittite (Kanesian) , Luwian , Lycian , Lydian , Palaic
Baltic			Latvian (Lettish), Lithuanian , Old Prussian
Celtic	Brythonic		Breton, Cornish, Welsh
	Continental		Gaulish
	Goidelic or Gaelic		Irish (Irish Gaelic), Manx , Scottish Gaelic
Germanic	East Germanic		Burgundian , Gothic , Vandalic
	North Germanic		Old Norse (see Norse ), Danish , Faeroese, Icelandic , Norwegian , Swedish
	West Germanic (see Grimm's law )	High German	German , Yiddish
	West Germanic (see Grimm's law )	Low German	Afrikaans , Dutch , English , Flemish , Frisian , Plattdeutsch (see German language )
Greek			Aeolic , Arcadian , Attic , Byzantine Greek , Cyprian , Doric , Ionic , Koinē , Modern Greek
Indo-Iranian	Dardic or Pisacha		Kafiri, Kashmiri, Khowar, Kohistani, Romany (Gypsy), Shina
	Indic or Indo-Aryan		Pali , Prakrit , Sanskrit , Vedic
		Central Indic	Hindi , Hindustani , Urdu
		East Indic	Assamese, Bengali (Bangla), Bihari, Oriya
		Northwest Indic	Punjabi, Sindhi
		Pahari	Central Pahari, Eastern Pahari (Nepali), Western Pahari
		South Indic	Marathi (including major dialect Konkani), Sinhalese (Singhalese)
		West Indic	Bhili, Gujarati, Rajasthani (many dialects)
	Iranian		Avestan , Old Persian
		East Iranian	Baluchi, Khwarazmian , Ossetic, Pamir dialects, Pashto (Afghan), Saka (Khotanese) , Sogdian , Yaghnobi
		West Iranian	Kurdish, Pahlavi (Middle Persian) , Parthian , Persian (Farsi), Tajiki
Italic	(Non-Romance)		Faliscan , Latin , Oscan , Umbrian
	Romance or Romanic	Eastern Romance	Italian , Rhaeto-Romanic , Romanian , Sardinian
	Romance or Romanic	Western Romance	Catalan , French , Ladino, Portuguese , Provençal, Spanish
Slavic or Slavonic	East Slavic		Belarusian (White Russian), Russian , Ukrainian
	South Slavic		Bulgarian , Church Slavonic , Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian , Slovenian
	West Slavic		Czech , Kashubian, Lusatian (Sorbian or Wendish), Polabian , Polish , Slovak
Thraco-Illyrian			Albanian, Illyrian , Thracian
Thraco-Phrygian			Armenian , Grabar (Classical Armenian) , Phrygian
Tokharian (W China)			Tokharian A (Agnean) , Tokharian B (Kuchean)

Create a link to this page

Copy and paste this link tag into your Web page or blog:

<a href="http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/.aspx#1E1-IndEurTABLE" title="Facts and information about The Indo-European Family of Languages">The Indo-European Family of Languages</a>

Give this article a thumbs-up on StumbleUpon

Cite this article
Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.

MLA
Chicago
APA

"The Indo-European Family of Languages." The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2008. Encyclopedia.com. 15 Nov. 2009 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

"The Indo-European Family of Languages." The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2008. Encyclopedia.com. (November 15, 2009). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-IndEurTABLE.html

"The Indo-European Family of Languages." The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2008. Retrieved November 15, 2009 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-IndEurTABLE.html

Learn more about citation styles

Indo-European languages

World Encyclopedia | 2005 | Â© World Encyclopedia 2005, originally published by Oxford University Press 2005. (Hide copyright information) Copyright

Indo-European languages Family of languages spoken throughout all of Europe and sw and s Asia, and used in all the areas of European settlement, such as Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, the USA, and Latin America. It consists of the following subgroups: the Germanic languages, the Celtic languages and the Indo-Iranian (including Persian, Avestan, and the Indic languages – Sanskrit, Pali, and modern Hindi). Other languages and groups in the family are Armenian, Albanian, Greek, the Italic languages (including Latin and its descendants, the Romance languages), the Baltic group (including Latvian and Lithuanian), and the Slavic group (including Old Church Slavonic, Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, Croatian, and others). About half the world's population speaks an Indo-European language.

Create a link to this page

Copy and paste this link tag into your Web page or blog:

<a href="http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/.aspx#1O142-IndoEuropeanlanguages" title="Facts and information about The Indo-European Family of Languages">The Indo-European Family of Languages</a>

Cite this article
Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.

MLA
Chicago
APA

"Indo-European languages." World Encyclopedia. 2005. Encyclopedia.com. 15 Nov. 2009 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

"Indo-European languages." World Encyclopedia. 2005. Encyclopedia.com. (November 15, 2009). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O142-IndoEuropeanlanguages.html

"Indo-European languages." World Encyclopedia. 2005. Retrieved November 15, 2009 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O142-IndoEuropeanlanguages.html

Learn more about citation styles

Indo-European

The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English | 2009 | © The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English 2009, originally published by Oxford University Press 2009. (Hide copyright information) Copyright

In·do-Eu·ro·pe·an • adj. of or relating to the family of languages spoken over the greater part of Europe and Asia as far as northern India. ∎ another term for Proto-Indo-European. • n. 1. the ancestral Proto-Indo-European language. ∎ the Indo-European family of languages. 2. a speaker of an Indo-European language, esp. Proto-Indo-European.

Create a link to this page

Copy and paste this link tag into your Web page or blog:

<a href="http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/.aspx#1O999-indoeuropean" title="Facts and information about The Indo-European Family of Languages">The Indo-European Family of Languages</a>

Cite this article
Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.

MLA
Chicago
APA

"Indo-European." The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English. 2009. Encyclopedia.com. 15 Nov. 2009 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

"Indo-European." The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English. 2009. Encyclopedia.com. (November 15, 2009). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O999-indoeuropean.html

"Indo-European." The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English. 2009. Retrieved November 15, 2009 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O999-indoeuropean.html

Learn more about citation styles

Free newspaper and magazine articles

	Factfile on -- languages. Magazine article from: New Internationalist; 10/1/2000
	"Frost: Life and Culture of the Sami Reindeer People of Norway".(exhibitions ) Magazine article from: New Criterion; 4/1/2006
	Hungarian Rhapsodies: Essays on Ethnicity, Identity and Culture.(Review) Magazine article from: The Modern Language Review; 7/1/1999

Facts and information from other sites

Related articles from newspapers, magazines, and more

	'Indo-European' designates languages: not pots and not institutions. Magazine article from: Antiquity; 9/1/2005; ; 700+ words ; ...categories as language, ethnicity...the term 'indo-European' to mean...therefore to languages, members of the language family first recognised...specific language belongs to...both those languages within that...institutions as 'Indo-European...
	Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction.(Book review) Magazine article from: The Journal of the American Oriental Society; 4/1/2006; ; 700+ words ; Indo-European Language and Culture...introduction to Indo-European linguistics...Fortson's new book, Indo-European Language...comparative method, the Indo-European family, an outline of...back to the proto-language, since they are...l forms ...
	Language and linguistics.(Pre-Indo-European)(Book Review) Magazine article from: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute; 12/1/2003; ; 700+ words ; ...relations of Pre-Indo-European, which occupies...Lehmann has viewed Indo-European typologically...reconstruction of proto-languages for macro-families, judging it a...depth of different language families often...considerably from that of Indo-European ...
	Mother tongue's been wagging up to 10,000 years Indo-European, ancestor of English and other languages, traced back farther in history Newspaper article from: Oakland Tribune; 11/28/2003; ; 700+ words ; Indo-European -- the mother tongue...modern and extinct languages as American English...calculating dates of language divergence by examining...similar in two or more languages. "It gave some...linguistics: whether Indo-European originated...building a root language) is ...
	Profile: New research weighs in on the evolution of Indo-European languages Transcript from: NPR All Things Considered; 11/26/2003; ; 700+ words ; ...the evolution of Indo-European languages Host: MICHELE...Robert Siegel. Languages evolve as living...of the English language and related tongues...steppe spread the Indo-European tongue...looking at penguin family trees, and was...
	Before Babel.(spread of Indo-European languages)(Brief Article) Magazine article from: U.S. News & World Report; 12/8/2003; ; 536 words ; ...whether the original Indo-European tongue was spread...Darwin--that languages evolve and branch...and structures in languages such as English...concluded that the language family began branching...fighting, that spread Indo-European languages...
	The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material Culture, and Ethnicity, vol. 1. Magazine article from: The Journal of the American Oriental Society; 1/1/1998; ; 700+ words ; ...Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins has little...between human biology, language, and material culture...is not an unmixed Indo-European language. We have come to...the Sino-Tibetan family of languages are also present...
	Indo-European's rise to world dominance Newspaper article from: International Herald Tribune; 3/1/2008; ; 700+ words ; ...Wheel, and Language," David...very large Indo-European language family. All of...Sanskrit languages (among other families) are Indo- European...Indo-European came from...the Indo-Europeans as bellicose...
	Indo-European pursuits: scientific paths diverge in the quest for ancient Eurasians.(Cover Story) Magazine article from: Science News; 2/25/1995; ; 700+ words ; ...Indo-European, a family of languages that...an ironic twist, Indo-European's close family...words as the first Indo-Europeans may have spoken...thinking of the first Indo-Europeans than...sounds in various languages -- descended from a common ...
	A NEW WORD ON BIRTH OF WESTERN LANGUAGES SCIENTIST SAYS ROOTS STRETCH 9,000 YEARS Newspaper article from: The Boston Globe; 11/27/2003; ; 700+ words ; ...of the vast family of languages called Indo- European, which includes...of all the Indo-European...how quickly languages change, this...to ancient language splits. But...14 dates for language splits that...trees for the languages, as well as...origin of ...