The Indo-European Language Family
Introduction
Indo-European is a family of languages that first spread throughout Europe and many parts of South Asia, and later to every corner of the globe as a result of colonialization. The family includes most of the languages of Europe, as well as many languages in Southwest, Central and South Asia. With close to 3 billion speakers, the Indo-European language family has the largest number of speakers of all language families.
It would not have been possible to establish the existence of the Indo-European language family if scholars had not compared the systematic resemblances between European languages and Sanskrit, the oldest language of the Indian subcontinent that left many written documents. The common origin of European languages and Sanskrit was first proposed by Sir William Jones (1746-1794). Systematic comparisons between these languages by Franz Bopp supported this theory and laid the foundation for postulating that all Indo-European languages descended from a common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European (PIE), thought to have been spoken before 3,000 B.C. It then split into different branches that, in turn, split into different languages in the subsequent millennia.
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Scholars disagree about the original homeland of PIE.
Since *Proto-Indo-European has no no written records, historical linguists construct family trees, an idea pioneered by August Schleicher, on the basis of the comparative method used to detect genetic relationships between languages and to establish a consistent relationship hypothesis. Using this method, a common ancestral language is reconstructed, and a sequence of regular changes by which these languages can be derived from it are described. The chart below shows how this method actually works with some Indo-European languages. Please note that * means "reconstructed, not attested" form; > means "became.".
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Structure
Sound Changes
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As Proto-Indo-European broke up, its sound system diverged as well, following different laws in the daughter languages. One of them is Grimm's law. Grimm's law
Click here for an amusing illustration of Grimm's Law and of words for family, plants, animals, sky, and counting in nine Indo-European languages. Centum-Satem division
The terms centum-satem come from the words for "one hundred" in representative languages of each group. Please note that not all languages fall neatly into these categories.
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 Hittite Relief |
Reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European show that its nouns were marked for gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), number (singular, plural, and dual), case (nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, ablative, locative, and instrumental). Adjectives agreed with nouns in case, number, and gender. Verbs were marked for aspect, mood, tense, voice, person, and number. They agreed with their subjects in person and number. These characteristics are present to various degrees in all modern Indo-European languages. With a few exceptions, all Indo-European words underwent inflection. The structure of all inflected words, regardless of part of speech, was the same: root plus one or more suffixes plus ending. This structure is apparent in all present-day Indo-European languages. |
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The comparative method enables us to reconstruct a basic vocabulary for Proto-Indo-European that extends to most aspects of their culture. This basic vocabulary is not uniformly attested across all languages which suggests that some words may have developed later or were borrowed from other languages. For instance *wĪro "man" can be found in English virile, while *gwenā "woman" is found in English gynecology and Slavic zhena "woman, wife." Click here to learn about PIE vocabulary in greater detail. |
Branches
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Branches of the Indo-European Language Family
Figures in parentheses indicates number of languages/dialects listed by Ethnologue. |
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