Indo-European Languages
The Indo-European languages form the best-known, most widely spoken, and best-explored family of undoubtedly genetically related languages. Genetically related languages are demonstrably derived from a common ancestor, a "Proto-Language," which, in the case of Indo-European, is thought to have flourished during the fourth–third millennia BCE, before it split up into the daughter languages from which scholars are able to infer its existence. No theory about the area where this language may have been spoken has become generally accepted among scholars so far, but the south Russian steppes, Anatolia, or south-central Asia are most often mentioned as likely locations.
Attempts to reconstruct key aspects of the material and spiritual culture of the people who spoke Proto-Indo-European are likewise highly controversial, but the available lexical data (reconstructed words) point to a culture that already knew the most important cultural innovations (agriculture, animal husbandry) developed during the Neolithic Period.
The discovery by the Orientalists Sir William Jones and Franz Bopp around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that most languages of Europe (the only exceptions being, among living languages, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, some other languages of Finno-Ugric stock, and isolated Basque) and some important languages of South and Southwest Asia are demonstrably related laid the foundation for the scholarly discipline of historical-comparative linguistics.
On the European continent, the members of the family are Greek, Latin, and the Romance languages (languages derived from Latin), which together with some extinct languages of ancient Italy (like Oscan and Umbrian) form the Italic branch of Indo-European; the Slavic (Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croat, Bulgarian, etc.) and Baltic languages (Lithuanian, Latvian, extinct Old Prussian), the combination of which into a Balto-Slavic branch has won some support; Armenian; Albanian; Germanic (Gothic, German, Dutch, English, the Scandinavian languages); Celtic (Irish, Welsh, Breton); and some extinct and mostly only fragmentarily attested languages like Thracian and Illyrian, both once spoken on the Balkan peninsula. In Asia, Indo-Iranian and the extinct Tocharian and Anatolian language families are members of Indo-European stock.
Anatolian Languages
After Hattushash, the capital of the Hittite (or Nesan, according to the self-designation of its people) empire (c. sixteenth–twelfth centuries BCE), was discovered in 1906 and excavated near the modern Boghazköy in central Anatolia, a hitherto unknown group of languages, clearly Indo-European, but not belonging to a well-known group, entered the roster of Indo-European languages. These languages came to be known as the Anatolian branch of Indo-European, its members including the Hittite language itself, which together with Palaic was written in a variant of the cuneiform script; Luwian, which was partly written in this script as well and partly in a peculiar script, which is generally known as "Luwian Hieroglyphs" (but which is not to be confused with Egyptian Hieroglyphic writing); and Lydian and Lycian. (The latter two are fragmentarily attested languages of southwest Anatolia.)
Though Anatolian languages differ greatly, both in terms of structural makeup and material commonalities, from other Indo-European languages, their membership in the family has never been seriously in doubt. The theory that Proto-Anatolian was a sister to Proto-Indo-European rather than a daughter like all other branches has sometimes been popular (the "Indo-Hittite" theory). Whether the poorer morphological system of Anatolian or the more elaborate ones of Indo-Aryan and Greek, for example, more closely reflect the situation of the parent language continues to be debated.
Tocharian Languages
Like the Anatolian languages, Tocharian was unknown until the early twentieth century, when between 1908 and 1914 members of European and Japanese expeditions to Chinese Turkestan (modern Xinjiang Uygur) found documents written in a variety of the Indic Brãhmi script and in a hitherto unknown but clearly Indo-European language. The documents contain texts written in two dialects (or rather, separate languages), usually referred to as Tocharian A (or East Tocharian, Agnian) and B (West Tocharian, Kuchean), respectively. West Tocharian is generally viewed as more archaic.
Like Anatolian, Tocharian differs considerably from the better-known Indo-European languages, though less dramatically, and its status as one of the daughter languages of Proto-Indo-European has never been doubted. Some (especially morphological) phenomena of Tocharian, the easternmost Indo-European language, find their best parallels in the far West, in Celtic and Italic, but attempts to unite these languages into a single subgroup have been unsuccessful.
Indo-Iranian Languages
By far the largest and most important Indo-European branch on the Asian continent is the Indo-Iranian or Aryan group. The latter name is derived from the attested self-designation of the earliest-known speakers of these languages.
Indo-Iranian languages form an uncontroversial primary branch of Indo-European, which is further subdivided into the Indo-Aryan (or Indic) and the Iranian groups. A third group, consisting only of unwritten languages spoken in eastern Afghanistan, is the Nuristani group (formerly also known as the Kafiri languages), with languages such as Kati, Waigali, Ashkun, and Prasun.
Both Indo-Aryan and Iranian languages have been attested since at least the first millennium BCE. Old Indian is represented by Vedic, the language of the sacred literature of Brahmanic religion, and Sanskrit, the highly normed and thus to a degree artificial language of classical Indian literature.
The various Prakrit variants, which began to be attested with the inscriptions of the Mauryan emperor Asoka (273–232 BCE), and Pali, the language of the classical Buddhist canon, form the corpus of Middle Indian. From the beginning of the second millennium CE, New Indian languages are attested. Not unlike the Romance languages, which are derived from what is commonly called Vulgar Latin, New Indian languages can be seen as continuations of a protolanguage that was close to, without being identical with, an attested language, Sanskrit, which continues to be used as a language of religion and learning.
The better-known New Indian languages include: the Hindi-Urdu dialect-cluster, Panjabi, and Gujarati as the central group; Nepali and other languages of the Pahari branch, Oriya, Bengali, and Assamese (eastern group); Marathi and Konkani (southern group); Sindhi and the Lahnda dialect-cluster (northwest group); and Sinhalese on Sri Lanka, which occupies a special position in the family. In the northwest of the Indian subcontinent, the Dardic languages were often grouped with the Nuristani languages, but nowadays they are classified as a special Indo-Aryan group, the most important member of which is Kashmiri.
Old Iranian is represented by Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenid royal inscriptions, and Avestan, in which the sacred writings of the Zoroastrian religion were composed. From the Middle Iranian period onward, the Iranian family is clearly subdivided into western and eastern branches. Western Middle Iranian languages are Middle Persian and Parthian; eastern Middle Iranian languages are Bactrian, Khotanese, Sogdian, and Chorasmian. The most important modern languages of the Iranian family are (West Iranian) Persian (Farsi, Dari, and Tajiki), Tati, Baluchi, Zaza, and numerous unwritten languages spoken in Iran, which are often erroneously classified as Persian dialects, such as Mazanderani, Gilaki, Sangesari, and many others. Modern East Iranian languages are Pashto, Ossetic, and numerous unwritten languages of the Pamir region (Tajikistan), such as Wakhi, Bartangi, Sarykoli, and many others.
Stefan Georg
Further Reading
Beekes, Robert S. P. (1995) Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Gamkrelidze, Thomas V., and Vyacheslav V. Ivanov. (1995) Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Lehmann, Winfred P. (1993) Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics. London and New York: Routledge.
Mallory, James P., and Douglas Q. Adams. (1997) Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn.
Masica, Colin P. (1991) The Indo-Aryan Languages. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
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