Indo-European languagesThe Indo-European languages include some 150 languages spoken by about three billion people, including most of the major language families of Europe and western Asia, which belong to a single superfamily. Popular languages in this superfamily include English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Russian, Persian, Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu. The possibility of common origin of these disparate tongues was first proposed by Sir William Jones, who noticed similarities between four of the oldest languages known in his time, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Persian. Systematic comparison of these and other old languages conducted by Franz Bopp supported this theory. In the 19th century, scholars used to call the group "Indo-Germanic languages" or sometimes "Aryan". However when it became apparent that the connection is relevant to most of Europe's languages, the name was expanded to Indo-European. An example of this was the strong similarity discovered between Sanskrit and older spoken dialects of Lithuanian. The common ancestral (reconstructed) language is called Proto-Indo-European (PIE). There is disagreement as to the original geographic location (the so-called "Urheimat" or "original homeland"), where it originated from, with Armenia, the area to the north or west of the Black Sea, or Anatolia itself[1] prime examples of proposed candidates. The various subgroups of the Indo-European family include:
See also\n* Language families and languages\n* August Schleicher, (A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages) (1861/62)\n* List of Indo-European rootsExternal Links
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