The Indo-European Family of Languages
| Level 0 |
| Proto-Indo-European* |
Proto-Indo-European, or PIE as it is sometimes called, is believed by linguistic scholars to be the ancestor of most of the languages of Europe, Asia Minor and the Indian sub-continent. There are no actual examples of PIE, as it is a hypothetical language, reconstructed from bits of languages thought to have ‘evolved’ from it. For this reason, it has been noted in Italic type with an *.
| Level 1 | Celtic* | Italic* | Germanic* | Slavonic* | Baltic* | Albanian | Greek | Armenian | Anatolian* | Indo-Iranian* | Tocharian* |
The linguistic ‘branches’ above are all believed to have descended from PIE with no intervening stage between them, i.e. they are thought to be the ‘daughter’ languages of the parent Indo-European. Three of these, namely Albanian, Greek and Armenian, consist of only one language, all of which still exist today. The remaining eight branches, however, have all been arrived at by linguistic reconstruction, i.e. they also are hypothetical. There are no surviving Anatolian or Tocharian languages, so they have been underlined. We then move on to the next level:
| Level 1 | Celtic* | Italic* | Germanic* | Slavonic* | Baltic* | Indo-Iranian* |
| Level 2 | Brittonic, Gaelic, Gaulish, etc | Latin, Osco-Umbrian | West Germanic, North Germanic, East Germanic | South Slavonic, East Slavonic, West Slavonic | Latvian, Lithuanian, Old Prussian | Indic, Iranian, Dard |
Not until we move two steps away from PIE (apart from those branches consisting of one language only) do we reach any languages that provide actual evidence of their existence. The Osco-Umbrian, East Germanic (i.e. Gothic), Old Prussian, Dard and Gaulish languages (along with every other ‘Continental Celtic’ language) did not survive into modern times, so they have been underlined.
Latvian and Lithuanian did not split further into daughter languages, so then we move on to:
| Level 2 | Brittonic | Gaelic | Latin (Romance) | West Germanic | North Germanic | South Slavonic | East Slavonic | West Slavonic | Indic | Iranian |
| Level 3 | Welsh Breton Cornish | Irish Manx Scottish Gaelic | Italian Spanish Portuguese French Romanian Catalan etc | German English Dutch Flemish Frisian etc | Norwegian Icelandic Faeroese Danish Swedish etc | Serbo-Croat Bulgarian Slovene Macedonian etc | Russian Ukrainian Belorussian etc | Polish Czech Slovak etc | Gujarati Bengali Punjabi Hindi Urdu Marathi Hindustani etc | Persian Kurdish Baluchi Pashto Ossetian etc |
At this level we have most of the languages still spoken today.
It’s worth noting that even the above has been simplified, but hopefully the principle is obvious enough.
The different levels show the paths the different languages took, but not the timescale. Branches and groups do not conveniently split up into daughter languages simultaneously. The Gaelic and North Germanic (Scandinavian) languages, for instance, remained mutually intelligible until later than the Brittonic or Latin (Romance) ones.
Obviously, the concept of the ‘evolution’ of languages has been heavily influenced by Darwinian evolutionary theory. The biggest problem with this is that languages simply do not evolve in the same way as biological species. Biological species split, whereas languages split and also borrow from other languages. The traditional Indo-European family tree just ignores borrowing when classifying languages, although borrowing takes place quite normally in all languages except very isolated ones that do not come into contact with others.
In some cases, like English and Armenian, borrowing has significantly altered the nature of the language.
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