Indo-European languages

Family of languages that includes some of the world's major classical languages (Sanskrit and Pali in India, Zend Avestan in Iran, Greek and Latin in Europe), as well as several of the most widely spoken languages (English worldwide; Spanish in Iberia, Latin America, and elsewhere; and the Hindi group of languages in northern India). Indo-European languages were once located only along a geographical band from India through Iran into northwestern Asia, Eastern Europe, the northern Mediterranean lands, northern and Western Europe and the British Isles.

When first discussed and described in the 19th century, this family was known as the Aryan and then the Indo-Germanic language family. Because of unwelcome associations with the Nazi idea of ‘Aryan’ racial purity and superiority, both titles have been abandoned by scholars in favour of the neutral ‘Indo-European’. In general terms, many Indo-European languages (such as English, French, and Hindi) have tended to evolve from the highly inflected to a more open or analytic grammatical style that does not greatly depend on complex grammatical endings to nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Eastern Indo-European languages are often called the satem group (Zend ‘a hundred’) while western Indo-European languages are the centum group (Latin ‘a hundred’); this illustrates a split that occurred over 3,000 years ago, between those that had an s-sound in certain words and those that had a k-sound. Scholars have reconstructed a Proto-Indo-European ancestral language by comparing the sound systems and historical changes within the family, but continue to dispute the original homeland of this ancient form, some arguing for northern Europe, others for Russia north of the Black Sea.