Indo-European languages
language family native to western and southern Eurasia— Europe, Iran and India
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the north of the Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and Greater Iran, with additional native branches found in regions such as Armenia, parts of the southern Indian subcontinent (Sri Lanka and the Maldives), and even stretching as far as to mainland Southeast Asia (Rohingya language in Myanmar). Historically, Indo-European languages were also spoken in Anatolia and Northwestern China. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches, of which eight are still spoken: four by hundreds of millions of native speakers each (Indo-Iranian, Italic, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic), and four by fewer than fifteen million native speakers each (Hellenic, Albanoid, Armenian, and Celtic). Two major branches are extinct (Anatolian and Tocharian), as are a number of other Indo-European languages.
Today the individual Indo-European languages with the most native speakers are Spanish, Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu), English, Portuguese, Bengali, Punjabi, Russian, Marathi, German, French, and Persian; many others spoken by smaller groups are in danger of extinction. Over 3.4 billion people (42% of the global population) speak an Indo-European language as a first language—by far the most of any language family. There are about 446 living Indo-European languages, according to an estimate by Ethnologue, of which 313 belong to the Indo-Iranian branch.
All Indo-European languages are descended from a single prehistoric language, linguistically reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime during the Neolithic or early Bronze Age (c. 3300 – c. 1200 BC). The geographical location where it was spoken, the Proto-Indo-European homeland, has been the object of many competing hypotheses; the academic consensus supports the Kurgan hypothesis, which posits the homeland to be the Pontic–Caspian steppe in what is now Ukraine and Southern Russia, associated with the Yamnaya culture and other related archaeological cultures during the 4th and early 3rd millennia BC.
By the time the first written records appeared, Indo-European had already evolved into numerous languages, spoken across much of Europe and large parts Asia (Central, West and South). Some European languages of this family—English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Dutch—have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across Africa, Americas, Oceania and North Asia.
“Indo-European languages” enters the record as language family native to western and southern Eurasia— Europe, Iran and India. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Indo-European, languages and language can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19860. The Library of Congress control number is sh85065703. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1200.
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This entry incorporates text from “Indo-European languages” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.