The Indo-European Language Family

Modern languages like English, Spanish, Russian and Hindi as well as ancient languages like Greek, Latin and Sanskrit all belong to the Indo-European language family. This book addresses the fundamental question of how these languages are related. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Modern languages like English, Spanish, Russian and Hindi as well as ancient languages like Greek, Latin and Sanskrit all belong to the Indo-European language family, which means that they all descend from a common ancestor. But how, more precisely, are the Indo-European languages related to each other? This book brings together pioneering research from a team of international scholars to address this fundamental question. It provides an introduction to linguistic subgrouping as well as offering comprehensive, systematic and up-to-date analyses of the ten main branches of the Indo-European language family: Anatolian, Tocharian, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic. By highlighting that these branches are saliently different from each other, yet at the same time display striking similarities, the book demonstrates the early diversification of the Indo-European language family, spoken today by half the world''s population. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.