Daughter Branches
The Indo-European language family descends from Proto-Indo-European through a series of intermediate proto-languages, each defining a major branch. Select a branch to explore its languages, sound laws, and attested reflexes of PIE roots.
An independent IE branch with a single language (Albanian), heavily influenced by Latin, Greek, Turkish, and Slavic.
The earliest attested IE branch, including Hittite and Luwian. Extinct by the first millennium BCE.
An independent IE branch with a single language (Armenian), initially misclassified as Iranian.
Lithuanian and Latvian, notable for their archaic features preserving PIE characteristics.
The branch comprising the Baltic (Lithuanian, Latvian) and Slavic language groups.
The P-Celtic languages: Welsh, Breton, and Cornish.
Once widespread across Europe, now comprising the Goidelic (Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx) and Brythonic (Welsh, Breton, Cornish) branches.
Extinct branch best known through Gothic, attested in Wulfila's 4th-century Bible translation.
The branch including English, German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages, characterised by Grimm's Law consonant shift.
The Q-Celtic languages: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx.
The branch comprising Ancient Greek, its dialects (Attic, Ionic, Doric, Aeolic), and Modern Greek.
The Indic sub-branch including Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Urdu, and hundreds of other languages of South Asia.
The largest IE branch by number of speakers, comprising the Indic (Indo-Aryan) and Iranian sub-branches.
The Iranian sub-branch including Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, and Ossetian.
The branch that includes Latin and the Osco-Umbrian languages, ancestral to the Romance languages.
The Scandinavian languages: Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese.
A small group of languages spoken in eastern Afghanistan, sometimes classified separately from Indo-Aryan and Iranian.
An extinct IE language of ancient Anatolia, possibly related to Greek. Attested in inscriptions from the 8th century BCE.
The reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family, spoken approximately 4500-2500 BCE.
The daughter languages of Vulgar Latin: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, and others.
Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, Bulgarian, and other Slavic languages.
An extinct IE branch attested in manuscripts from the Tarim Basin (modern Xinjiang), comprising Tocharian A and B.
English, German, Dutch, Frisian, and Yiddish.