Indo-European Branches

Indo-European Branches Germanic Romance Balto-Slavic Indo-Iranian

Germanic branch English is part of the Germanic branch because it is spoken by Germanic tribes that invaded England 1,500 years ago. English and German belong to the Western part of the Germanic branch because they have many words in common The Western part of the Germanic branch are divided into High and Low Germanic subgroups because they are found in high and low elevations. Languages spoken in the Low Germanic subgroup include English, Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans, Frisian, and a dialect of German. The Germanic language branch also includes North Germanic languages spoken in Scandinavia: Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic.

Indo-Iranian Branch The branch with the most speakers Includes more than 100 individual languages Spoken by more than 1 billion people Divided into and Eastern (Indic) and western (Iranian) subgroups

India has 18 official languages Indic (eastern group) The most used languages in India and their neighboring countries belong to the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian branch. Approximately 1/3 of Indians use an Indic language called Hindi, and it is spoken in many different ways therefore making it a collection of many individual languages One of the main elements of cultural diversity of the 1 million citizens of India is language, and there are four main language families: Indo-European (north), Dravidian (south), Sino-Tibetan (northeast), and Austro-Asiatic (central and eastern highlands). When India became an independent state in 1947, Hindi was made the official language India has 18 official languages More than 90% of the population speak at least one of these languages, but as many as 10 billion people speak another

Iranian (western group) Indo-Iranian languages are also spoken in Iran and neighboring countries The major Iranian group languages include Persian (Farsi), Pathan, and Kurdish. These languages are written in Arabic

Balto-Slavic Branch Slavic was once a single language, but differences developed in the 7th century. Several groups of Slavics migrated from Asia to different areas of Eastern Europe living in isolation from one another, and as a result it is split into East, West, and South Slavic subgroups

East Slavic The most widely used Slavic languages are in the Eastern subgroup. Russian is one of the six official languages in the United Nations. The importance of Russian increased with the Soviet Union’s rise to power after WWII. In Eastern European countries that were dominated politically and economically but the Soviet Union, Russian was taught as the second language Ukrainian and Belarusian are the second two most important East Slavic languages and official languages in Ukraine and Belarus. The two principle Baltic languages are Latvian and Lithuanian, official languages in Latvia and Lithuania

Differences among all Slavic languages are small. West and south Slavic The most spoken West Slavic language is Polish, followed by Czech and Slovak. The two most important South Slavic languages are Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian. Differences among all Slavic languages are small. For example, a Czech can understand most of what is said or written in Slovak and could become fluent without much difficulty.

Romance Branch The Romance language branch evolved from the Latin language spoken by Romans about 2,000 years ago. Four most widely used languages are Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian. The European regions in which these four languages are spoken correspond somewhat to the boundaries of the modern states of Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy. The fifth most important Romance language, Romanian, is the principal language of Romania and Moldova. The distribution of Romance languages shows the difficulty in trying to establish the number of distinct languages in the world. In addition to the other 5 languages, Romansh and Catalan are two other official Romance languages.