Indo-European Language Family Essay Example

missionaries, the vast majority of the Celtic and Germanic languages use the Latin alphabet. The Latin Branch; also called the Romance languages. These languages are all derived from Latin. Latin is one of the most important classical languages. Its alphabet, which was derived from the Greek alphabet, is used by many languages of the world. The Slavic Branch; these languages are confined to Eastern Europe.

The Baltic Branch; there are three Baltic States, but only two Baltic languages, Lithuanian and Prussian. The Hellenic Branch; the only language in this branch is Modern Greek. The Illyric Branch; another single language branch, only Albanian. The Anatolian Branch; all languages in this branch are extinct. The Thracian Branch; represented by a single modern language, Armenian. The Iranian Branch; these languages descended from ancient Persian. The Indic Branch; this branch has the most languages. The Tokharian Branch; recently identified extinct languages from west China.

Some linguists say that Indo-European languages form part of a hypothetical Nostratic language family, and attempt to relate Indo-European to other language families, such as South Caucasian languages, Uralic languages, Dravidian languages, and Afro-asiatic languages. This theory remains highly controversial, and is not accepted by most linguists in the field. Objections to such groupings are not based on any theoretical claim about the likely historical existence or non-existence of such families; it is entirely reasonable to suppose that they might have existed.