INDO-EUROPEANS

Introduction

Indo-European is originally a linguistic term, referring to the Indo-European language family. By extension, it became a collective name for cultures and religions associated with these languages. Hypothetically, these cultures arose from the expansion of an ancient people, the Proto-Indo-Europeans, possibly originating from somewhere around the Black Sea region from the 5th millennium BC onward.

The Indo-European language family is attested in twelve branches, some of them extinct, with a historical distribution over most of Europe, Anatolia, Iran, India and parts of Central Asia (East Turkistan). During the age of colonialism, Indo-European languages spread from Europe to all continents, and today there are over three billion speakers of Indo-European languages, distributed over all the world.

The languages are traditionally separated into a Satem group in the east (Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Armenian) and a Centum group in the west (Greek, Italic, Celtic, Germanic), according to their different treatment of PIE velar sounds. The two groups are considered paraphyletic, i.e. there are no separate proto-languages for each group and their common characteristics are likely due to prolonged contact because of their geographical proximity. Also, there is evidence that the Anatolian, Tocharian and Albanian branches belong to neither of the two groups.

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