Indo-European languages
From UniLang Wiki
A major family of nearly 400 languages which spread throughout Europe and Southern Asia in the fourth millennium BCE, and which is now found, as a result of colonialism, all over the world.
The parent language, Proto-Indo-European, is traditionally thought to have been spoken in many dialects by a seminomadic population living in the steppe region to the north of the Black Sea. These people moved west to Europe, and east to Iran and India, arround the beginning of the Bronze Age, the different daughter languages being well established by 1000 BCE, when Greek, Anatolian, and Indo-Iranian languages are in evidence.
The family has 10 branches, though in the case of Albanian, Armenian, Greek and Tocharian, the branches are represented by a single language. The total number of speakers is over 2500 million.
The existence of Proto-Indo-European was postulated at the end of the 18th century, following a comparison of Sanskrit and European languages. In the 1980s, a controversial alternative view about the Indo-European homeland was proposed by British archeologist Colin Renfrew, who argued for a much earlier point of origin (c. 7000 BCE) in Anatolia (Asia Minor).
For the branches and individual languages, see:
