Indo-European Family of Languages Prepared by Furkhat Checked by Mr. Khuanishbay Introduction

Indo-European Family of Languages Prepared by Furkhat Checked by Mr. Khuanishbay

Introduction

The Indo-European languages are a language family of several hundred related languages and dialects. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to the estimate by Ethnologue, with over two thirds of them belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch. The most widely spoken Indo-European languages by native speakers are Spanish, Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu), English, Portuguese, Bengali, Punjabi, and Russian, each with over 100 million speakers, with German, French, Marathi, Italian, and Persian also having more than 50 million. Today, nearly 42% of the human population (3.2 billion) speaks an Indo-European language as a first language, by far the highest of any language family.

Branches of Indo-European Languages

The Indo-European languages have a large number of branches: Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, Greek, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Armenian, Tocharian, Balto-Slavic, and Albanian.

Anatolian

During the first and the second millennia BC, present Asian Turkey, and Northern Syria spoke now extinct Anatolian languages, the best known of which was Hittite, the official language of the Hittite empire, flourished in the second millennial.

Before 1906, few Hittite texts were known.

Moreover, they were not interpreted as Indo-European until 1915.

The integration of Hittite into Indo-European comparative grammar was, therefore, one of the principal developments of Indo-European studies in the XX century.

The most ancient Hittite texts date from the 17th century BC, whereas the latest ones - from approximately 13th century BC.

Indo-Iranian

The second branch is Indo-Iranian.

It is subdivided into sub-branches: Indic and Iranian, predominant in India, Pakistan, Iran, and its vicinity, and also in areas from the Black Sea to Western China today.