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:
- Indo-Iranian: Hindi, Bengali, Persian, Pashto
- Germanic: English, German, Dutch, Swedish
- Romance: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese
- Slavic: Russian, Polish, Czech
- Celtic: Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic
- Baltic: Latvian, Lithuanian
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.