Within the classification of languages, we find the Indo-European. Most of the languages spoken in Europe and South Asia have a number of common features that indicate that they come from the same language family. We could say that the languages that are part of it are the most widely spoken in the world. Indo European languages with list
Currently, more than 150 languages are part of this Indo-European language family and have more than 3.2 billion speakers, which is 45 percent of the world’s population. Here, therefore, we see that it is one of the most important families in the world.
Indo-European languages have a common origin, although their origin is full of unknowns and hypotheses. One of the most widespread is that all the languages that we know today and that are within these come from a common language called Indo-European.
This language was the one spoken by the peoples that were part of this social and cultural environment made up of a nomadic population that quickly established itself throughout the world. Their migrations soon covered a large area of territory in what we know today as Europe and Asia.
On the other hand, another theory indicates that these could come from a great empire from which different peoples arose that separated after having coexisted unified in the past. That is, the different Indo-European languages could come from a common language used in a great empire in which customs and culture were shared and later divided into others.
The Indo-European family is first identified in the 18th century, at which time Sir William Jones, studying Sanskrit, discovered that it had many points in common with Greek and Latin. This made him suspect that the three languages must necessarily have a common origin. From this ancestor, the Germanic languages would also come, something he discovered after analyzing the languages spoken by Slavic and Baltic groups.
Classification of Indo-European languages
The scarcity of written documentation about this early period represented one of the major problems in determining the affinities, relationships, and hierarchical arrangements of the Indo-European
language family. In general, a distribution into ten main groups is accepted, ordered according to the age of available texts and documentation.
1-Anatolic
The languages of the Anatolic group, now extinct, were spoken during the two millennia before the Christian era, in Anatolia (present -day Asiatic
Turkey and northern
Syria ). They were discovered at the beginning of the
20th century, in documents found in the excavations of Boghazköy. The most important of the group were: Hittite, Palaite, Luwite, Lycian, Lydian and Carian.
2-Indo-Iranian
The Indo-Iranian, or Aryan, group comprises two major subgroups: the Indic and the Iranian. Indic, spoken before 1000 BC, in what is now northern India and Pakistan, has its original source in Vedic Sanskrit, which would give rise to Classical Sanskrit, the cultured
language, and Prakrit, the spoken vulgar language. This, in turn, would give rise to a set of local
dialects from which modern languages emerged: Hindi (official language of India), Urdu (official language of Pakistan), Sinhalese (Sri Lanka), Bengali (
Bangladesh ), Nepali (
Nepal ) , Penjabi and Sindhi (Pakistan), among others. This group also includes Romani or Gypsy, an ancient
dialect of northern India that, from the 5th century BC, spread through Persia (now Iran) until reaching Europe and from there to America.
The languages of the Iranian subgroup were spoken during the first millennium before the Christian era in the regions later occupied by Iran and Afghanistan, as well as in a wide region stretching northward from Hungary to
Chinese Turkestan. The oldest are Avestan (or Zende) — preserved in the Avesta, a collection of sacred
books of the followers of Zoroastrianism — and Old Persian, or Mede, preserved in cuneiform inscriptions from the 4th and 5th centuries BC Modern Iranian languages are the Persian, spoken in Iran and parts of Afghanistan; Afghani (or Pashto, Puchtu or Pushtu), the official language of Afghanistan; Kurdish, spoken in Kurdistan; beluchi, in Pakistan; and the Ossetian, in the central region of the Caucasus.
3-Greek
Despite its various
dialects, Greek was, throughout its history, a unique language, spoken in
Greece .probably from the end of the third millennium BC. The oldest forms that are preserved are the Cretan inscriptions in the syllabic alphabet, known as Mycenaean or Linear B (1400-1200 BC), a primitive pre-Hellenic
language. The fusion of this
culture with that of the Indo-European tribes that arrived on the peninsula during the second millennium (Achaeans, Ionians, Aeolians and Dorians) gave rise to the Greek people. The political and cultural prestige enjoyed by Athens during the 5th century BC favored the supremacy of Attic over all other
dialects. It even became the basis of Koine, or common
Greek language, whose different local varieties and evolution over the centuries gave rise to modern Greek.
4-Italic
The predominant and oldest Italic language is
Latin, whose first written manifestations date back to the 6th century BC Spoken in the Lazio region and in Rome, Latin coexisted with other languages - Oscan, Umbrian and Falisco -, which were superseded when Rome It became the main political center of the Italian peninsula. The survival and subsequent evolution of Vulgar
Latin in the European territories that were part of the Roman Empire gave rise to the Neo-Latin or Romance languages: Catalan, Dalmatian, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Provencal, Romanian, Romanian and Sardinian. This classification, however, varies according to the different schools.
5-Germanic
In the middle of the first millennium before the Christian era,
Germanic tribes inhabited southern Scandinavia and northern Germany. From about 200 BC, however, they spread across southern and central Europe. Within the Germanic group, three subgroups are distinguished: East Germanic, Nordic and West Germanic. All East Germanic languages are extinct. The most important of these is Gothic — documented in a translation of the Bible carried out in the 4th century AD by the Visigothic
bishop Ulfila. In the Nordic Germanic subgroup, which expanded through Scandinavia and Denmark, two major branches were distinguished from the 9th century onwards: East Norse, in which Swedish and Danish are classified, and West Norse, with Icelandic, Norwegian and Faroese (spoken in the Faroe Islands). The West Germanic subgroup,
6-Armenian
The presence of Armenian peoples in the region of later eastern Turkey and Armenia has been recorded since the 6th century BC It was not until the 5th century AD, however, that an extensive Armenian
literature began to emerge, consisting mainly of translations of the Bible and other texts. religious
books.
7-Tocarian
Today extinct, the Tocharian group is known thanks to the discovery, at the end of the
19th century, of several texts dating from the period between the years 500 and 700 of the Christian era. Written in the Indian Brami syllabic alphabet, it was spoken in present-day
Chinese Turkestan and was divided into two subgroups: Tocharian A, or Oriental, from the Turfan region, and Tocharian B, mainly from Kutcha, but also from Turfan.
8-Celtic
Celtic languages were spoken in the last centuries before the Christian era, in a vast region of Europe, from Spain and the British Isles to the Balkans, and were subdivided into continental and insular Celtic. Continental Celtic, or Gaulish, disappeared after being absorbed by the
Latin and Germanic languages. Insular Celtic survived, which branched off into Gaelic or Goidelic Celtic – which comprises Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx (extinct at the beginning of the
19th century, in the Isle of Man) – and Brythonic or British Celtic – – which includes Breton (spoken in Lower Brittany, France), Welsh (in Wales) and Cornish (extinct at the end of the 18th century in Cornwall).
9-Balto-Slavic
Balto-Slavic languages are spoken over a large
area of eastern Europe and have numerous affinities. The Baltic subgroup comprises Old Prussian (extinct in the
18th century), Lithuanian and Latvian — official languages of Lithuania and Latvia, respectively. To the Slavic subgroup, documented from the 9th century onwards, in the form called Old
Church Slavonic, belong Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Czech and Polish.
10-Albanian
Documented from the
15th century onwards, Albanian is the official language of
Albania and is also spoken in Kosovo, Yugoslavia, and Macedonia. Its origin is still unknown, although some theories link it to Illyrian, an ancient
language of the northwestern Balkans.
Characteristics and dispersion of Indo-European languages
The idea of a kinship relationship between some Indo-European languages (Greek,
Latin, Sanskrit, Germanic and Celtic) was first proposed in 1786 by the British Orientalist Sir William Jones, who suggested that these languages were derived from a common source. It was, however, the comparative studies of Indo-European languages, initiated a few years later by the Germans Franz Bopp and Jacob Grimm, that established the phonological correspondences, grammatical similarities and lexical affinities between the languages of the Indo-European family. For the reconstruction of the original Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European, Sanskrit,
Latin and Greek were taken as the main models – the oldest languages, on which abundant documentation was available.
As we have already pointed out, we can find more than 150 languages that exist today and that have a common origin in the Indo-European languages. For their part, these, in turn, are divided into other language families. This makes Indo-European languages one of the most geographically widespread and is spoken by more than 2.5 billion people in the world.
Within the Indo-European languages, we can find 11 branches that have their own variations in the number of speakers and some that have already disappeared. Although there are not many tools for their dating, the most widespread theories indicate that these could be divided into these branches that we know today before the year 3,000 BC. C. Indo European languages with list
From this point on, the dialects differentiated from each other in a very clear way until they became separate languages that went their own way. But, due to this common origin, they conserved common features that continue to this day. Below is the list of list of Indo European languages.
1-Indo-European languages of the second millennium BC
- Anatolian branch
- Indo-Iranian branch
- Hellenic Branch (Greek)
2-Indo-European languages of the first millennium BC
- Rama Italica (Latin)
- Celtic Branch
3-The Indo-European languages of the first millennium after Christ
- Germanic Branch (English, German)
- Armenian Branch
- Tocaria Branch
- Baltic Branch Indo European languages with list
- Slavic Branch
- Albanian Branch
Phonetic structure of Indo-European
The phonetic structure of Indo-European includes a small number of vowels: “a”, “e”, “o” and “i”, “u”, these also function as semivowels (“y” and “w”). The difference between long and short forms the rhythmic principle of the
language. This timbre, later
variable according to the languages, was determined by morphological conditionings. As for consonants, the
language is rich in plosives and poor in spirants. The Indo-European morphology is inflected, with a predominance of variable
words, composed of two elements: the theme, which indicates the meaning, and the ending, which contains the grammatical marks. The verbal system is based on the opposition of aspects (perfective, imperfective and optative) and on the determination of tenses and persons through endings. The nominal system (nouns and
adjectives) has three genders, three numbers (singular, plural and dual) and eight cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, locative, instrumental and vocative). The pronominal system presents a different inflection from the nominal one, does not present
gender and relies on the vowel gradation of the root to express number and case.
The study of the
lexicon of Indo-European languages constitutes one of the most obscure points in the determination of the moment of its dispersion. The impossibility of precisely clarifying the circumstances that determined, for example, semantic changes, the presence of the same lexical element with different meanings in different languages or the absence of similar forms of a word in related languages reduces the deductions to hypotheses.
It is evident, however, that the interaction between nearby languages or the modifications imposed on each language by the expansion of its territorial limits – once the initial differentiation of the Indo-European languages had been produced – provoked their
evolution to linguistic forms, in for the most part, simpler than those of Indo-European. Characteristic features of this evolution are: loss of inflections, reduction or disappearance of grammatical gender; loss of cases and increased use of prepositions; replacement of the complex verbal system by the use of a single root and the introduction of new tenses and moods; and
lexicon modification.
We hope you have noted the list of Indo European languages.
