Indo-European people
| Indo-European | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution |
Originally parts of Asia and large parts of Europe, now worldwide Native speakers: ~3.2 billion |
| Linguistic classification | One of the world's primary language families |
| Proto-language | Proto-Indo-European |
| Subdivisions | |
| ISO 639-2 / 5 | |
| Glottolog | indo1319 |
Present-day native distribution of Indo-European languages, within their homeland of Eurasia:
(Latvian and Lithuanian)
Non-Indo-European languages
Dotted/striped areas indicate where multilingualism is common |
|
Originally parts of Asia and large parts of Europe, now worldwide
The Indo-European languages are a language family of several hundred related languages and dialects.
There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to the estimate by Ethnologue, with over two thirds (313) of them belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch. The most widely spoken Indo-European languages by native speakers are Spanish, English, Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu), Portuguese, Bengali, Punjabi, and Russian, each with over 100 million speakers, with German, French, Marathi, Italian, and Persian also having significant numbers. Today, 42% of the human population (3.2 billion) speaks an Indo-European language as a first language, by far the highest of any language family.
The Indo-European family includes most of the modern languages of Europe; exceptions include Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, several minor Uralic languages, Turkish (a Turkic language), Basque (a language isolate), and Maltese (a Semitic language). The Indo-European family is also represented in Asia with the exception of East and Southeast Asia. It was predominant in ancient Anatolia (present-day Turkey), the ancient Tarim Basin (present-day Northwest China) and most of Central Asia until the medieval Turkic and Mongol invasions. With written evidence appearing since the Bronze Age in the form of the Anatolian languages and Mycenaean Greek, the Indo-European family is significant to the field of historical linguistics as possessing the second-longest recorded history, after the Afroasiatic family, although certain language isolates, such as Sumerian, Elamite, Hurrian, Hattian, and Kassite are recorded earlier.
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