verifiedCite
While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.
Select Citation Style

What are some examples of languages within the Indo-European family?

The Indo-European language family encompasses languages spoken across Europe, areas of European settlement, and much of Southwest and South Asia. This family is categorized into several main branches, each of which is made up of one or more languages:

These languages share a number of vocabulary items and grammatical affixes. It is believed that they originated from a common ancestral language, Proto-Indo-European, spoken by a relatively small population group around 4000 bce.