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 book 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.”
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the term used by linguists in talking about and describing the aboriginal Indo-European language community. Historical linguists, using a comparative method, have been able to reconstruct some of the ancient language. In her book Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe from the First Ventures to the Vikings, Jean Manco writes:
“There are about 1,500 reconstructed PIE roots and words. This must fall short of the full language. Yet the PIE lexicon reveals a great deal about the lifestyle of its speakers. They were familiar with agriculture and metallurgy. They coined words for wheels and wagons. They had a concept of social ranking, but few words for specific occupations or other clues to urban life. The lexicon reveals a Copper Age society, but not an urbanized state.”
In her entry on the Greek language in the Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece, Eleanor Dickey reports:
“The original Proto-Indo-European language from which Greek and all of those other languages evolved was highly inflected; it had eight cases for nouns and divided number not into singular and plural but into singular, dual (used for two people or objects), and plural (used for three or more).”
By about 2500 BCE, Proto-Indo-European was a dead language, survived by descendant languages which evolved into the languages of today’s Indo-European language family.
With regard to the comparative method used by linguists to determine that the Indo-European languages had a single ancestral language, P.H. Mathews writes in Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction:
“This involves a step-by-step comparison of different languages, in which we look for detailed correspondences that cannot be reasonably explained unless a common ancestor existed.”
In her chapter in the Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution, Mary LeCron Foster writes:
“During the nineteenth century European philologists developed the comparative method for linguistic reconstruction. Details of the method were worked out during a concerted effort to understand the history of those languages of Europe and Asia that came to be known as Indo-European (IE).”
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
The Albanian language family has only one existing spoken language, Modern Albanian. It is spoken by about 5 million people, living primarily in Albania, Kosovo, the Republic of Macedonia, and Greece.
Anatolian
The Anatolian language 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. The Anatolian languages are currently extinct.
Armenian
Like Albanian, at the present time there is only one existing spoken language in the Armenian family: Modern Armenian. It is estimated that there are 8 to 12 million Armenian speakers. Some linguists feel that there was early contact between Anatolian and Armenian.
Balto-Slavic
The Balto-Slavic 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. In his book The Origins of the British, Stephen Oppenheimer writes:
“New evidence places the split that produced the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family rather earlier than previously thought. Dating this branch split could be Celtic linguistic origins at the start of the European Neolithic, consistent with the separate southern Neolithic expansion round the coast of the Mediterranean. The final break-up of the Atlantic coast Celtic languages may have been as early as 5,000 to 3,000 years ago, during the Neolithic period in the British Isles.”
At one time Celtic languages were spoken throughout western Europe. As the Romans began their invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, for example, Celtiberian was the dominant language of the region. Stephen Oppenheimer writes:
“The record of Iberian inscriptions shows Celtiberian as a major Continental branch of Celtic languages. This evidence comes from around seventy inscriptions totaling around a thousand words dating from the third to the first century BC.”
With the Roman expansion into western Europe, the Celtic languages declined as the Celtic tribes were incorporated into the Latin-speaking Roman Empire. The languages survived on the peripheries of the Empire, in Britain and Ireland.
While the last native speaker of Cornish died in 1676, in the twentieth century there has been a renewed interest in the language and, as a result, there are about 3,500 Cornish second-language speakers today. Cornish is officially recognized by the United Kingdom as a minority language.
Breton, a Celtic language spoken in France, has about 500,000 speakers. In his book The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, Jared Diamond reports:
“However, the French government’s official policy is in effect to exclude the Breton language from primary and secondary schools, and Breton’s use is declining.”
With regard to the Celtic languages spoken in Ireland and Scotland, Alistair Moffat and James Wilson, in their book The Scots: A Genetic Journey, write:
“Both the Irish and Scots dialects of Gaelic contain very unusual locutions, ways of saying everyday things which exist in only 10 per cent of the world’s languages, and not at all on mainland Europe.”
Alistair Moffat and James Wilson also write:
“These and at least fifteen other common and fundamental structural differences are shared in one particular area. Along the North African coast, speakers of Berber, Egyptian Arabic and some of the other Semitic languages (including Maltese, the only Semitic language to be written in the Roman alphabet) use the same forms as a Gaelic-speaking crofter on the Isle of Lewis.”
Germanic
Germanic 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). In his book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, John McWhorter writes:
“Among Germanic languages, Icelandic, spoken on a remote island, has (1) rarely been learned by foreigners and (2) is also the least simplified member of the family. Even today, its grammar is so little changed from Old Norse that Icelanders can read the epic eddas in Old Norse written almost a thousand years ago.”
Greek
The Greek language family includes Modern Greek as well as many ancient Greek dialects. In the first millennium BCE, there were five major dialect groups of Greek: Attic-Ionic, Arcado-Cypriot, Aeolic, Doric, and Northwest Greek. Classical Greek is generally Attic, the dialect of Athens in the fifth century BCE.
In his entry on dialects in the Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece, Roger Woodard writes:
“Those Indo-Europeans who arrived in the Balkan peninsula in the late 3rd or early 2nd millennium BC—who we may call the Proto-Greeks—were themselves members of a dialectical subgroup of the Indo-European family of languages and peoples. Common linguistic innovations suggest that the ancestors of the Greeks, Indo-Iranians, and Armenians spoke related varieties of late Indo-European.”
The Proto-Greeks displaced earlier peoples who spoke non-Indo-European languages.
In her entry on language in the Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece, Eleanor Dickey reports:
“Greek is one of the oldest attested Indo-European languages; its earliest known form is Mycenaean, the language of the Linear B tablets.”
It is estimated that Modern Greek is spoken by about 13 million people.
Indo-Iranian
The Indo-Iranian language family includes the Indo-Aryan languages (which include 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). In his book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, David Anthony reports:
“Avestan Iranian was the language of the Avesta, the holiest text of Zoroastrianism. The oldest parts of the Avesta, the Gathas, probably were composed by Zoroaster (the Greek form of the name) or by Zarathustra (the original Iranian form) himself.”
Italic
The Italic language family includes languages which branched off from Latin: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, Catalan, and Romansh.
Tocharian
Tocharian is an extinct language family which represents the eastern-most extension of Indo-European. These languages were spoken in western China.
Other European Languages
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. Of these Basque is generally considered to be a remnant of the aboriginal European languages. Jared Diamond writes:
“The spread of the Indo-European language family into western Europe, beginning within the last 9,000 years, eliminated all of the aboriginal language families of Europe except for the Basque language of the Pyrenees.”
Language 101/201
Language 101/201 is a series exploring various topics in linguistics. The designation 201 indicates that the essay is an expansion of an earlier essay in this series. More from this series:
Language 101: "Body Language"
Language 101: The Search for Origins