Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are a 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 (313) of them belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch. The Indo-European family includes most major current languages of Europe, and parts of Western, Central and South Asia. It was also predominant in ancient Anatolia (present-day Turkey), and the ancient Tarim Basin (present-day Northwest China) and most of Central Asia until the invasion and migrations of Turkic speakers especially during the Mongol–Turkic conquest in the 13th century. With written evidence appearing since the Bronze Age in the form of the Anatolian languages and Mycenaean Greek, the Indo-European family is significant to the field of historical linguistics as possessing the second-longest recorded history, after the Afroasiatic family.

Several disputed proposals link Indo-European to other major language families.

Indo-European (disambiguation)

Indo-European most commonly refers to a related family of languages in Europe and Asia

Indo-European may refer to various topics related to that family of languages:

In a different domain, the phrase Indo-European is also used as a synonym of:

See also

Indo-European studies

Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics and an interdisciplinary field of study dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. Its goal is to amass information about the hypothetical proto-language from which all of these languages are descended, a language dubbed Proto-Indo-European (PIE), and its speakers, the Proto-Indo-Europeans, including their society and religion. The studies cover where the language originated and how it spread. This article also lists Indo-European scholars, centres, journals and book series.

Study methods

The comparative method was formally developed in the 19th century and applied first to Indo-European languages. The existence of the Proto-Indo-Europeans had been inferred by comparative linguistics as early as 1640, while attempts at an Indo-European proto-language reconstruction date back as far as 1713. However, by the 19th century, still no consensus had been reached about the internal groups of the IE family.

The method of internal reconstruction is used to compare patterns within one dialect, without comparison with other dialects and languages, to try to arrive at an understanding of regularities operating at an earlier stage in that dialect. It has also been used to infer information about earlier stages of PIE than can be reached by the comparative method.