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The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family— English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish —have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several ...
Spanish ( español) or Castilian ( castellano) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin spoken on the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. Today, it is a global language with about 500 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain, and about 600 million when including second language ...
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. Indo-European language family has 10 known branches or subfamilies, of which eight are living and two are extinct.
Language family. A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term family is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics analogous to a family tree, or to phylogenetic trees of taxa used in evolutionary taxonomy.
Languages of Europe. A color-coded map of languages used throughout Europe. There are over 250 languages indigenous to Europe, and most belong to the Indo-European language family. [ 1][ 2] Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language.
Along with Latin and a few extinct languages of ancient Italy, the Romance languages make up the Italic branch of the Indo-European family. [8] Identifying subdivisions of the Romance languages is inherently problematic, because most of the linguistic area is a dialect continuum , and in some cases political biases can come into play.
They include Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Polish, Slovak, and Slovene. The Baltic languages, Latvian and Lithuanian; the Celtic languages, including Irish; and Greek are also Indo-European. Outside the Indo-European family, Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian are Uralic languages while Maltese is the only Afroasiatic language with official status ...
Map of major Dravidian languages. Distribution of the Indo-European language family branches across Eurasia. Area of the Papuan languages. Map of the Australian languages. Distribution of language families and isolates north of Mexico at first contact. The major South American language families. Ethnolinguistic groups of mainland Southeast Asia.