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Indo-European studies ( German: Indogermanistik) is a field of linguistics and an interdisciplinary field of study dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. [ 1] The goal of those engaged in these studies is to amass information about the hypothetical proto-language from which all of these languages are descended, a ...
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 ...
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.
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.
The Indo-European family is a major topic of study. As of January, 2012, they had collected and coded a "screened" database of "22 phonological characters, 13 morphological characters, and 259 lexical characters," and an unscreened database of more. Wordlists of 24 Indo-European languages are included.
The evolution of languages or history of language includes the evolution, divergence and development of languages throughout time, as reconstructed based on glottochronology, comparative linguistics, written records and other historical linguistics techniques. The origin of language is a hotly contested topic, with some languages tentatively ...
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.