In studying how languages have emerged, changed, and died, linguists use the concept of the language family: a group of closely related languages that exhibit similar traits, but which are still independent of each other. English is a part of the Indo-European family of languages which most linguists feel first emerged about 8,000 years ago in an area just north of the Black Sea. Linguistic evidence suggests that the first Indo-Europeans lived in an area that was not near water, but in the forest. They raised domestic animals including the sheep, the cow, and the horse. This was a time when the only metal they used was copper.
The initial idea of the existence of the Indo-European language family came in 1786 when a British linguist, Sir William Jones, gave a lecture on “The Sanskrit Language” to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta, India. Jones suggested that Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek were all related and, furthermore, that they were also related to Gothic and Farsi. According to Jones:
“The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists…”
Linguist John McWhorter in his
The Power of Babel writes:
“In fact, any language is most likely one of a litter of pups, and Latin itself was no exception. Latin began as one of several transformations of a language of which no records remain, but which we can deductively reconstruct from similarities between it and several dozen other languages in Europe, Iran, and India, collectively termed the Indo-European family.”
At the present time, about half of the world’s population speaks an Indo-European language as their native tongue. Today’s linguists generally view the large Indo-European language family as being made of the ten “daughter” families which are described below.
Albanian: this language family has only one existing spoken language, Modern Albanian.
Anatolian: this family is important to linguists because it includes Hittite, one of the oldest Indo-European languages for which there is writing. The antiquity of this written language has been important in reconstructing Indo-European.
Armenian: like Albanian, at the present time there is only one existing spoken language in this family: Modern Armenian.
Balto-Slavic: This language family includes the Baltic languages (Lithuanian and Latvian) and the Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and others). Many linguists feel that Lithuanian has remained archaic in that it has retained most of the features of the original language. Linguist Kenneth Katzner in The Languages of the World puts it this way:
“It has been said that the speech of the Lithuanian peasant is the closest thing existing today to the speech of the original Indo-Europeans.”
Celtic: In some areas, the ancient Celts are associated with the spread of the Iron Age. While they once occupied most of Europe, today the only surviving Celtic languages include Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, Breton, and Welsh.
Germanic: this is the language family to which English belongs and it includes the modern languages of German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian, Yiddish, and the Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Icelandic).
Greek: This language family includes Modern Greek as well as many ancient Greek dialects.
Indo-Iranian: This language family includes the Indo-Aryan languages (which includes many of the modern languages spoken in India, such as Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, and others) and the Iranian languages (such as Farsi, Kurdish, Tajik, Ossetian, Baluchi, and others).
Italic: This language family includes languages which branched off from Latin: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, Catalan, and Romansh.
Tocharian: This is an extinct language family which represents the eastern-most extension of Indo-European. These languages were spoken in western China.
While Indo-European is the mother language of most of today’s European languages, there are a number of languages spoken in Europe which are not a part of this language family: Basque, Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, Lappish, and Turkish.