The Indo-European family of languages is the world’s largest embracing most of the languages of Europe, America, and much of Asi
a. It includes the two great classical languages of antiquity, Latin and Greek, the Germanic languages such .as English, German, Dutch, and Swedish; the Romance languages such as Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese; the Celtic languages such as Welsh and Gaelic; the Slavic languages such as Russian, Polish, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian; the Baltic languages, Lithuanian and Latvian; the Iranian languages such as Persian and Pashto; the Indic languages such as Sanskrit and Hindi; and other miscellaneous languages such as Albanian and Armenian. In Europe only Basque, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Turkish, and a few languages of Russia are not of this family, the others have apparently all descended from an original parent tongue. The general consensus is that the original Indo-European civilization developed somewhere in eastern Europe about 3,000B.C. About 2,500B.C. it broke up; the people left their homeland and migrated in many different directions. Some moved into Greece, others made their way into Italy, other moved through Central Europe until they ultimately reached the British Isles. Another division headed northward into Russia, while still another branch crossed Iran and Afghanistan and eventually reached India. Wherever they settled, the Indo-Europeans appear to have overcome the local inhabitants and imposed their language upon them. One must conclude-that they were the most remarkable people. The possibility of so many languages having descended from a common ancestor was first suggested in 1786, though the similarity of Sanskrit and Italian was noted as early as the sixteenth century. By 1818 fifty separate languages were established as Indo-European; Albanian was added to the list in 1854 and Armenian in 1875. The total number of Indo-European speakers is about 1,875, 000, 000 people, approximately half the earth’s total population.