You may have noticed that a few languages spoken on the European continent are not included in the Indo-European family of languages. Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian belong to the Uralic (also called Finno-Ugric) family, and Basque (spoken in the Pyrenees region) has no genetic relation to any other language.
Which language is in the Indo-European family?
It consists of numerous Indo-Iranian languages, including Sanskrit, Hindi, and Farsi (Persian); Greek; Baltic languages such as Lithuanian and Latvian; Celtic languages such as Breton, Welsh, and Scottish and Irish Gaelic; Romance languages such as French, Spanish, Catalan, and Italian; Germanic languagessuch as German ...
How many languages are in the Indo-European family?
There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to the estimate by Ethnologue, with over two-thirds (313) of them belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch. All Indo-European languages are descended from a single prehistoric language, reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic era.
Which of these European languages does not belong to the Indo-European language family?
Which of these European languages does not belong to the Indo-European language family? Finnish is a Uralic language of the Finnic branch spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside Finland.
What language in the Italic branch is not part of the Indo-European family?
South Picene
(North Picene, known mainly from a 12-line inscription of about 500 bce on a stele from Novilara, is not an Italic language and may not even be an Indo-European language.)
What is the oldest Indo-European language?
Aside from a very poorly known dialect spoken in or near northern Iraq during the 2nd millennium bce, the oldest record of an Indo-Aryan language is the Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda, the oldest of the sacred scriptures of India, dating roughly from 1000 bce.
What is the oldest language in the world?
- Tamil: Origin (according to first appearance as script) – 300 BC. ...
- Sanskrit: Origin (according to first appearance as script) – 2000 BC. ...
- Greek: Origin (according to first appearance as script) – 1500 BC. ...
- Chinese: Origin (according to first appearance as script) – 1250 BC.
What are the six Indo-European languages?
There are six Indo-European languages spoken by millions of people in Europe today, including: Hellenic (Greek); Romance (Latin-based languages of the Mediterranean and Romanian); Celtic (largely extinct, but Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton); Germanic (Scandinavian languages, modern German, Dutch, and English); Balto- ...
What is India's largest Indo-European language?
The Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family is the largest language group in the subcontinent, with nearly three-fourths of the population speaking a language of that family as a mother tongue.
What language family is the second largest?
Another important language family is the Sino-Tibetan family . It is the world's second largest language family, with more than one billion speakers of its hundreds of different languages.
What are the four major Indo-European languages?
The Indo-European language family has four main living branches: Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, Germanic, and Italic . In the family tree provided below, the languages in the bottom boxes are the largest member language(s) of their respective branches.
What are European languages based on?
- Most languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family. ...
- Of the approximately 45 million Europeans speaking non-Indo-European languages, most speak languages within either the Uralic or Turkic families.
Why is it called Indo-European language?
The term Indo-European is essentially geographical since it refers to the easternmost extension of the family from the Indian subcontinent to its westernmost reach in Europe . The family includes most of the languages of Europe, as well as many languages of Southwest, Central and South Asia.
Are Italians Italic?
“italic type,” from Latin italicus “Italian” (see Italian); so called because it was introduced in 1501 by Aldus Manutius, printer of Venice (who also gave his name to Aldine), and first used in an edition of Virgil dedicated to Italy.
What language is Albanian similar to?
The Albanian language belongs to the Indo-European family of languages but has its own specifics, similar to Greek or Armenian , which means it does not have any direct similarities with other languages in the same family.
How language families are divided?
Language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units , conventionally referred to as branches of the family because the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram. ... The closer the branches are to each other, the more closely the languages will be related.
