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The Indo-European languages include some 443 (SIL estimate) languages and dialects
spoken by about three billion people, including most of the major language families of Europe and western Asia, which belong to a single superfamily. Contemporary languages in this superfamily include
Bengali, English,
French, German, Gujarati, Hindi, Italian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
History
See also: Proto-Indo-European, Historical linguistics, Glottochronology.
The possibility of common origin for these disparate
tongues 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 older spoken dialects of Lithuanian.
The common ancestral (reconstructed) language is called Proto-Indo-European (PIE). There is disagreement as to the original geographic location (the so-called "Urheimat" or "original
homeland"), where it originated from. The main canditates today are the steppes north of the Black Sea and the Caspian (see Kurgan), or Anatolia (see Colin Renfrew). Proponents of the Kurgan hypothesis tend to date the proto-language to ca. 4000 BC, while proponents of Anatolian origin usually date it several millennia earlier (see
Indo-Hittite).
Subgroups
The various subgroups of the Indo-European family include (cf.
Satem and Centum languages):
- Anatolian languages — earliest attested branch,
from the 18th century BC; extinct, most notable was the language of
the Hittites.
- Indo-Iranian languages — including Sanskrit, attested from the 2nd
millennium BC, Avestan and Persian.
- Greek language — fragmentary records in Mycenaean from the 14th century
BC; well attested from ca. the 7th century BC.
- Italic languages — including Latin and its descendants, the Romance languages,
attested from the 1st millennium BC.
- Celtic languages — Gaulish inscriptions date as early as the 6th century BC;
Old Irish texts from the 6th
century AD.
- Germanic languages (including English) — earliest testimonies in runic inscriptions from
around the 2nd century, earliest coherent texts in Gothic, 4th century.
- Armenian language — attested from the 5th century.
- Tocharian languages — extinct tongues of the
Tocharians, extant in two dialects, attested from roughly the 6th century.
- Baltic languages
- Slavic languages, attested from the 6th century, earliest texts in Old Church
Slavonic, 9th century.
- Albanian language — attested from the 16th century, sometimes placed with several extinct languages in the Illyrian languages subgroup.
- Phrygian language — extinct language of ancient
Phrygia, fragmentary.
- Thracian language — extinct, fragmentary.
- Dacian language — extinct, fragmentary.
Non-Indo-European languages of Europe
Most spoken European languages belong to the Indo-European superfamily. There are, however, language families which do not.
The Uralic 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 living languages.
The Maltese language and Turkish are two examples of languages spoken in Europe which have definite non-European origins. Turkish
is a Turkic language, and Maltese is largely derived from Arabic.
Superfamily
Some linguists propose that Indo-European languages are part of a hypothetical Nostratic language superfamily, and attempt to relate Indo-European to other language families, such as
Caucasian languages, Altaic languages, Uralic languages, Dravidian languages, Afro-Asiatic languages. This theory is controversial, as is the similar Eurasiatic theory of
Joseph H. Greenberg.
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