Indo-European languages

Family of languages with the greatest number of speakers, spoken in most of Europe
and areas of European settlement and in much of southwestern and southern Asia.

They are descended from a single unrecorded language believed to have been spoken
more than 5,000 years ago in the steppe regions north of the Black Sea and to have
split into a number of dialects by 3000 BC. Carried by migrating tribes to Europe and
Asia, these developed over time into separate languages. The main branches are
Anatolian, Indo-Iranian (including Indo-Aryan and Iranian), Greek, Italic, Germanic,
Armenian, Celtic, Albanian, the extinct Tocharian languages, Baltic, and Slavic. The
study of Indo-European began in 1786 with Sir William Jones's proposal that Greek,
Latin, Sanskrit, Germanic, and Celtic were all derived from a "common source." In
the 19th century linguists added other languages to the Indo-European family, and
scholars such as Rasmus Rask established a system of sound correspondences. Proto-
Indo-European has since been partially reconstructed via identification of roots
common to its descendants and analysis of shared grammatical patterns.

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language

System of conventional spoken or written symbols used by people in a shared culture

to communicate with each other.

A language both reflects and affects a culture's way of thinking, and changes in a
culture influence the development of its language. Related languages become more
differentiated when their speakers are isolated from each other. When speech
communities come into contact (e.g., through trade or conquest), their languages
influence each other. Most existing languages are grouped with other languages
descended "genetically" from a common ancestral language (see historical
linguistics). The broadest grouping of languages is the language family. For example,
all the Romance languages are derived from Latin, which in turn belongs to the Italic
branch of the Indo-European language family, descended from the ancient parent
language, Proto-Indo-European. Other major families include, in Asia, Sino-Tibetan,
Austronesian, Dravidian, Altaic, and Austroasiatic; in Africa, Niger-Congo, Afro-
Asiatic, and Nilo-Saharan; and in the Americas, Uto-Aztecan, Maya, Otomanguean,
and Tupian. Relationships between languages are traced by comparing grammar and
syntax and especially by looking for cognates (related words) in different languages.
Language has a complex structure that can be analyzed and systematically presented
(see linguistics). All languages begin as speech, and many go on to develop writing
systems. All can employ different sentence structures to convey mood. They use their
resources differently for this but seem to be equally flexible structurally. The principal
resources are word order, word form, syntactic structure, and, in speech, intonation.
Different languages keep indicators of number, person, gender, tense, mood, and other
categories separate from the root word or attach them to it. The innate human capacity
to learn language fades with age, and languages learned after about age 10 are usually
not spoken as well as those learned earlier. See also dialect.