Indo-European Family of Languages

When comparing multiple languages, it often becomes clear that some share relationships, while others appear isolated. By tracing seemingly related forms in various languages back to a common ancestor through older writings, we can establish that these forms are branches from a common root. Further investigation into early forms, each ancestral to later developments in different languages, supports the probability that they all descend from a common prehistoric original. This hypothetical original predates the earliest written languages and remains a strongly supported hypothesis. If other linguistic characteristics corroborate the relationship and common ancestry, we can classify these languages into families.

For example, examining the words for 'is' in various European and Asiatic languages, we can reconstruct the ancestral prehistoric word *esti. Latin est, Greek esti, Sanskrit asti, Russian есть (jest'), German ist, and Italian è suggest that the original form was *esti. Such reconstructed forms are marked with an asterisk to indicate they are probable reconstructions, not attested in writing. While these "starred forms" are crucial for specialists in early language history and classification, fewer of them should be used by students primarily dealing with English.

English, in all its stages, belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, formerly called Indo-Germanic and earlier referred to as Aryan. 'Indo-European' describes the set of linguistic forms from which nearly all European languages, as well as those of Persia and much of India, descend. However, it is uncertain whether these prehistoric forms coexisted or collectively constituted a single language, as languages change at different rates. Additionally, it would be incorrect to assume that a specific race or people spoke this Indo-European language, as race, culture, and language do not always correspond, as seen in modern Switzerland.

The term 'Indo-European' indicates that these languages span most of Europe and India. The earlier term 'Indo-Germanic' stems from the dominance of 19th-century German philologists. 'Aryan,' derived from the Sanskrit word āryas meaning 'noble,' was used by the fair-skinned bringers of Hindu civilization to India to distinguish themselves from the darker and less cultured peoples they conquered. Early scholars believed that Sanskrit, with its extensive inflections, was the ancestor of all known European and Asiatic languages, explaining the historical use of 'Aryan' for what is now called Indo-European.

Beginning several thousand years B.C., the Indo-European language, originating perhaps in Southern Europe near the Asian border, spread eastward and westward. As it spread, it mixed with many non-Indo-European languages, modifying it in various ways at different stages. As speakers moved farther from the original starting point, their forms of Indo-European developed distinct qualities, increasingly differentiating them from their common ancestor. This broad description outlines the gradual evolution into the modern languages of Europe, Persia, and India as we know them today.

The Indo-European languages are classified into eight main groups, all traceable back to a common primitive ancestor. These groups are divided into roughly Eastern and Western sets. The Eastern set comprises four groups, sharing certain fundamental changes from the original system, such as a general shift in the pronunciation of the 'guttural' consonants g and k to a 'palatal' position. For instance, the Indo-European assumed primitive form for the numeral 100 is kmtom. In the Western set, languages like Latin (centum) retain the original k-sound, while in Sanskrit, this k has changed to an ś-sound (śatam) and in Russian, it has become sto. Thus, the Western languages are commonly referred to as 'Centum-languages' and the Eastern as 'Satem-languages.'

The four Eastern groups are:

Balto-Slavic: including all the Slavic languages, ancient and modern, and the related Baltic languages like Lithuanian and Latvian.

Indo-Iranian: including the languages of old and new India, of which Sanskrit is a type, and the languages of Iran-Persia.

Armenian: ancient and modern with various dialects.

Albanian: spoken over a relatively small area but forming a distinct group.

The Western groups are:

Greek: ancient and modern, with many dialects.

Latin: and all its derivatives.

Celtic: surviving in ancient inscriptions and in the medieval and modern languages of Wales, Ireland, the Scottish Highlands, and Brittany, and formerly existing in Cornwall and the Isle of Man.

Germanic: comprising the languages of Germany, Scandinavia, Holland, and the Flemish parts of Belgium, as well as English, including these in some ancient and medieval forms.

Our primary focus here is on the Germanic group. What makes Germanic languages, and thus English, Indo-European? Indo-European is just one of many families into which the world’s languages can be divided. It should also be noted that many languages and even entire groups have not yet been scientifically examined or documented, and hence cannot be fitted into any classification scheme. Broadly speaking, two main characteristics indicate the 'Indo-Europeanness' of a language: its structure and its vocabulary. Indo-European languages generally align themselves in structure, particularly if one knows something of their historical development, with the description of forms invented by the ancient Greeks and termed 'Parts of Speech.' A language may retain inflections relatively fully from the original Indo-European, like Russian, or it may have lost most of its distinctive word-endings, like modern English. It may be 'synthetic' with full inflections or 'analytic' with few or none. But if we can readily classify its forms as nouns, verbs, etc., under the traditional classical terms of 'Parts of Speech,' it is likely to be Indo-European. For example, Chinese, with its forms consisting of what now seem to be merely monosyllabic roots rather than parts of speech, is not Indo-European.

In Europe, there are languages known as 'Finno-Ugrian' or 'Uralian'—such as Hungarian and Finnish—which do not always display parts of speech or words in the conventional sense. Instead, these languages often use a kind of phrase-complex in place of a clause or group of words, where a single root can be expanded with prefixes and suffixes to convey a wide range of meanings. These languages are sometimes classified as 'agglutinative' or 'incorporating.' Many languages of Central Asia, now part of the U.S.S.R., fall into this category.

Secondly, in terms of vocabulary, Indo-European languages share a common nucleus of fundamental roots, distinguishing them from all other language groups. This common vocabulary, although often altered beyond easy recognition except by linguistic specialists, includes many names for family relationships, basic domestic materials, and familiar animals. When these words are compared in their historical early forms and traced back to their pre-written ancestors, they are found across Indo-European languages but not outside these groups except through borrowing.

Thus, Germanic languages are considered Indo-European because they utilize parts of speech, whether with full inflections as in their ancient forms, or with reduced inflections tending towards analytic structures, as seen in modern Dutch or English. Additionally, they share a fundamental nucleus of vocabulary with other Indo-European languages. There are other criteria that could be applied, but enough has been said to broadly illustrate what is meant by describing English as Indo-European.