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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 ...
The (late) Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the linguistic reconstruction of a common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, as spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans after the split-off of Anatolian and Tocharian. PIE was the first proposed proto-language to be widely accepted by linguists.
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.
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Early Middle Ages, which in turn is thought to have descended from the earlier Proto-Balto-Slavic language, linking the Slavic languages to the Baltic ...
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.
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people [ nb 1] mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers.
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. A tree ...
Languages of the Indo-European family are classified as either centum languages or satem languages according to how the dorsal consonants (sounds of "K", "G" and "Y" type) of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) developed. An example of the different developments is provided by the words for "hundred" found in the early attested ...