List of Indo-European languages

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Indo-European languages worldwide by country
  Official or primary language
  Secondary official language
  Recognized
  Significant
  No use
The approximate present-day distribution of the Indo-European branches within their homelands of Europe and Asia:
  Albanian
  Armenian
  Balto-Slavic (Baltic)
  Balto-Slavic (Slavic)
  Celtic
  Germanic
  Hellenic (Greek)
  Indo-Iranian (Indo-Aryan, Iranian, and Nuristani)
  Italic (Romance)
  Non-Indo-European languages
Dotted/striped areas indicate where multilingualism is common.
The approximate present-day distribution of Indo-European languages within the Americas by country:
Romance:
  Spanish
  Portuguese
  French
Germanic:
  English
  Dutch
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The Indo-European languages include some 449 (SIL estimate, 2018 edition[1]) language families spoken by about or more than 3.5 billion people (roughly half of the world population). Most of the major languages belonging to language branches and groups of Europe, and western and southern Asia, belong to the Indo-European language family. Therefore, Indo-European is the biggest language family in the world by number of mother tongue speakers (but not by number of languages in which it is the 3rd or 5th biggest). Eight of the top ten biggest languages, by number of native speakers, are Indo-European. One of these languages, English, is the de facto World Lingua Franca with an estimate of over one billion second language speakers.

Each subfamily or linguistic branch in this list contains many subgroups and individual languages. Indo-European language family has 10 known branches or subfamilies, of which eight are living and two are extinct. The relation of Indo-European branches, how they are related to one another and branched from the ancestral proto-language is a matter of further research and not yet well known. There are some individual Indo-European languages that are unclassified within the language family, they are not yet classified in a branch and could be members of their own branch.

The 449 Indo-European languages identified in the SIL estimate, 2018 edition,[1] are mostly living languages, however, if all the known extinct Indo-European languages are added, they number more than 800 or close to one thousand. This list includes all known Indo-European languages, living and extinct.

A distinction between a language and a dialect is not clear-cut and simple because there is, in many cases, several dialect continuums, transitional dialects and languages and also because there is no consensual standard to what amount of vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and prosody differences there is a language or there is a dialect. (Mutual intelligibility can be a standard but there are closely related languages that are also mutual intelligible to some degree, even if it is an asymmetric intelligibility.) Because of this, in this list, several dialect groups and some individual dialects of languages are shown (in italics), especially if a language is or was spoken by a large number of people and over a big land area, but also if it has or had divergent dialects.

The ancestral population and language, Proto-Indo-Europeans that spoke Proto-Indo-European, estimated to have lived about 4500 BCE (6500 BP), at some time in the past, starting about 4000 BCE (6000 BP) expanded through migration and cultural influence. This started a complex process of population blend or population replacement, acculturation and language change of peoples in many regions of western and southern Eurasia.[2] This process gave origin to many languages and branches of this language family.

At the end of the second millennium BC Indo-European speakers were many millions and lived in a vast geographical area in most of western and southern Eurasia (including western Central Asia).

In the following two millennia the number of speakers of Indo-European languages increased even further.

By geographical area, Indo-European languages remained spoken in big land areas, although most of western Central Asia and Asia Minor was lost to another language family (mainly Turkic) due to Turkic expansion, conquests and settlement (after the middle of the first millennium AD and the beginning and middle of the second millennium AD respectively) and also to Mongol invasions and conquests (that changed Central Asia ethnolinguistic composition). Another land area lost to non-Indo-European languages was today's Hungary due to Magyar/Hungarian (Uralic language speakers) conquest and settlement. However, in the second half of the second millennium AD, Indo-European languages expanded their territories to North Asia (Siberia), through Russian expansion, and North America, South America, Australia and New Zealand as the result of the age of European discoveries and European conquests through the expansions of the Portuguese, Spanish, French, English and the Dutch. (These peoples had the biggest continental or maritime empires in the world and their countries were major powers.)

The contact between different peoples and languages, especially as a result of European colonization, also gave origin to the many pidgins, creoles and mixed languages that are mainly based in Indo-European languages (many of which are spoken in island groups and coastal regions).

Ancestral (Proto-Indo-European)[]

  • Proto-Indo-European (extinct) (see also Proto-Indo-European homeland)
    • Early Proto-Indo-European (First phase of Indo-European)
      • Middle Proto-Indo-European ("Classical" Indo-European)
        • Late Proto-Indo-European (Last phase of indo-European as spoken language before splitting into several languages that originated in the regional dialects that diverged in time, and in space with Indo-European migrations, these languages were the direct ancestors of today's subfamilies or "branches" of descendant languages) (larger clades of Indo-European than the individual subfamilies or the way individual subfamilies are related to each other is still an unresolved issue)

Dating the split-offs of the main branches[]

Indo-European migrations as described in The Horse, the Wheel, and Language by David W. Anthony

Although all Indo-European languages descend from a common ancestor called Proto-Indo-European, the kinship between the subfamilies or branches (large groups of more closely related languages within the language family), that descend from other more recent proto-languages, is not the same because there are subfamilies that are closer or further, and they did not split-off at the same time, the affinity or kinship of Indo-European subfamilies or branches between themselves is still an unresolved and controversial issue and being investigated.

However there is some consensus that Anatolian was the first group of Indo-European (branch) to split-off from all the others and Tocharian was the second in which that happened.[3]

Using a mathematical analysis borrowed from evolutionary biology, Donald Ringe and Tandy Warnow propose the following tree of Indo-European branches:[4]

David W. Anthony, following the methodology of Donald Ringe and Tandy Warnow, proposes the following sequence:[4]

  • Proto-Indo-European (PIE)

List of Indo-European protolanguages[]

The protolanguages that developed into the Indo-European languages

This is not a list of just Proto-Indo-European, but it also contains the protolanguages of Indo-European subfamilies

  • Pre-Proto-Indo-European
    • Proto-Indo-European (PIE) (Proper)
      • Early PIE
        • Proto-Anatolian
        • Middle PIE (Classical Proto-Indo-European)
          • Proto-Tocharian
          • Late PIE
            • Proto-Italic
            • Proto-Celtic
              • Proto-Continental-Celtic
                • Proto-Eastern-Celtic
                • Proto-Gaulish
                • Proto-Celtiberian
                • Proto-Gallaecian
              • Proto-Insular-Celtic
                • Proto-Brittonic
                • Proto-Goidelic
            • Proto-Armenian
            • Proto-Greek
            • Proto-Albanian
            • Proto-Indo-Iranian
              • Proto-Nuristani
              • Proto-Iranian
                • Proto-Scythian
                • Proto-Sogdo-Bactrian
              • Proto-Indo-Aryan
                • Proto-Bengali-Assamese
                • Proto-Punjabi
                • Proto-Bihari
            • Proto-Germanic
              • Proto-Northwest-Germanic
                • Proto-Norse
                • Proto-West-Germanic
              • Proto-East-Germanic
            • Proto-Balto-Slavic
              • Proto-Baltic
                • Proto-Western-Baltic
                • Proto-Eastern-Baltic
              • Proto-Slavic
                • Proto-Lechitic
                • Proto-Bulgarian-Macedonian
                • Proto-Shtokavian

The list below follows Donald Ringe and Tandy Warnow classification tree for Indo-European branches.[4]

Anatolian languages (all extinct)[]

Anatolian languages in 2nd millennium BC; Blue: Luwian, Yellow: Hittite, Red: Palaic.