National Geographic History - 01.2019 - 02.2019

14 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2019

Indo-Iranian branch, which includes Persian,

Urdu,Bengali,and Romani.Most European lan-

guages (with a few exceptions such as Basque,

Hungarian,Finnish,and Estonian) are also Indo-

European in origin, but they belong to differ-

ent branches. Spoken in Greece since at least

1600 B.C., Greek is a language family all its own,

while Latin and the Romance languages belong

to the Italic. English, German, and Norwegian

are a few that hail from the Germanic branch.Of

all the Indo-European languages spoken today,

the most popular in terms of active speakers are

Spanish, English, Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese,

and Russian.

Modern scholars share this desire with their

ancient ancestors. They have continued the

search to find the earliest languages spoken by

ancient people,hoping in earnest to find a com-

mon mother tongue. While academics debate

about the existence and spread of a single uni-

fying language,it is known that many languages

today—spoken from the Americas to the Bay of

Bengal—come from the Indo-European group of

languages. Modern scholars have identified 10

different Indo-European branches: Anatolian,

Indo-Iranian, Greek, Italic, Celtic, Germanic,

Armenian, Tocharian, Balto-Slavic, and Alba-

nian. These 10 groups have become the foun-

dation for linguists to trace modern language

development and for anthropologists, archae-

ologists, and historians to study humanity’s

distant past.

Around the world today, there are roughly

440 living languages that descend from Indo-

European.More than 300 of them belong to the

WRITTEN
IN STONE
An episode from
theMahabharata,
a great Indian epic
written in Sanskrit, is
depicted on seventh-
and eighth-century
A.D.rock reliefs
(above) carved at
Mahabalipuram,
India.

CIRCA 1900 B.C.

Anatolian

Old Hittite

(above)

CIRCA 1600 B.C.

Greek

Mycenaean

(above)

CIRCA 1000 B.C.

Indo-Iranian

Vedic Sanskrit

(above)

CIRCA 900 B.C.

Italic

Old Latin

(above)

CIRCA 500 B.C.

Celtic

Lepontic

(above)

Languages in the 10 primary

branches of the Indo-

European tree began to be

widely spoken in different eras.

ALL IN

THE FAMILY

PICTURES: ALBUM. EXCEPT TOCHARIAN: BRIDGEMAN/ACI

THE PERSIAN VERSION

Inscriptions in Old Persian are carved in

cuneiform script on the royal Achaemenid

tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam, Iran.

STUART FORSTER/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES

ERIC LAFFORGUE/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES