List of Indo-European languages


The Indo-European languages include some 1,449 language families spoken by about or more than 3.5 billion people. Most of the major languages belonging to language branches and groups of Europe, and Western and southern Asia, belong to the Indo-European language family. Therefore, Indo-European is the biggest language family in the world by number of mother tongue speakers. Eight of the top ten biggest languages, by number of native speakers, are Indo-European. One of these languages, English, is the de facto World Lingua Franca with an estimate of over one billion second language speakers.
Each subfamily or linguistic branch in this list contains many subgroups and individual languages. Indo-European language family has 10 known branches or subfamilies, of which eight are living and two are extinct. The relation of Indo-European branches, how they are related to one another and branched from the ancestral proto-language is a matter of further research and not yet well known. There are some individual Indo-European languages that are unclassified within the language family, they are not yet classified in a branch and could be members of their own branch.
The 449 Indo-European languages identified in the SIL estimate, 2018 edition, are mostly living languages, however, if all the known extinct Indo-European languages are added, they number more than 800. This list includes all known Indo-European languages, living and extinct.
A distinction between a language and a dialect is not clear-cut and simple because there is, in many cases, several dialect continuums, transitional dialects and languages and also because there is no consensual standard to what amount of vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and prosody differences there is a language or there is a dialect. Because of this, in this list, several dialect groups and some individual dialects of languages are shown, especially if a language is or was spoken by a large number of people and over a big land area, but also if it has or had divergent dialects.
The ancestral population and language, Proto-Indo-Europeans that spoke Proto-Indo-European, estimated to have lived about 4500 BCE, at some time in the past, starting about 4000 BCE expanded through migration and cultural influence. This started a complex process of population blend or population replacement, acculturation and language change of peoples in many regions of western and southern Eurasia.
This process gave origin to many languages and branches of this language family.
At the end of the second millennium BC Indo-European speakers were many millions and lived in a vast geographical area in most of western and southern Eurasia.
In the following two millennia the number of speakers of Indo-European languages increased even further.
By geographical area, Indo-European languages remained spoken in big land areas, although most of western Central Asia and Asia Minor was lost to another language family due to Turkic expansion, conquests and settlement and also to Mongol invasions and conquests. Another land area lost to non-Indo-European languages was today's Hungary due to Magyar/Hungarian conquest and settlement.
However, in the second half of the second millennium AD, Indo-European languages expanded their territories to North Asia, through Russian expansion, and North America, South America, Australia and New Zealand as the result of the age of European discoveries and European conquests through the expansions of the Portuguese, Spanish, French, English and the Dutch.
The contact between different peoples and languages, especially as a result of European colonization, also gave origin to the many pidgins, creoles and mixed languages that are mainly based in Indo-European languages.

Hypothetical ancestors

Hypothetical relation to other language families and their proto-languages
Although all Indo-European languages descend from a common ancestor called Proto-Indo-European, the kinship between the subfamilies or branches, that descend from other more recent proto-languages, is not the same because there are subfamilies that are closer or further, and they did not split-off at the same time, the affinity or kinship of Indo-European subfamilies or branches between themselves is still an unresolved and controversial issue.
Using a mathematical analysis borrowed from evolutionary biology, Don Ringe and Tandy Warnow propose the following tree of Indo-European branches:
David W. Anthony, following the methodology of Don Ringe and Tandy Warnow, proposes the following sequence:
The protolanguages that developed into the Indo-European languages
This is not a list of just Proto-Indo-European, but it also contains the protolanguages of Indo-European subfamilies
Indo-European languages whose relationship to other languages in the family is unclear
Unclassified languages that may have been Indo-European or members of other language families
Languages that may have existed and may have been Indo-European