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NATIONALGEOGRAPHICHISTORY 21
IN 1815 EUROPEAN POWERS HELD COLONIES IN LANDS FAR FROM
HOME. IMPERIALISM SPREAD INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES—
ESPECIALLY ENGLISH AND SPANISH—ALL OVER THE WORLD.
Life and Death of Languages
Of the 10 main branches that spring from
Indo-European, two are extinct: Anatolian
and Tocharian. The latter was once spoken in
the Tarim Basin, today in northwestern China,
and represents the easternmost reach of this
prodigious family of languages. Texts written in
Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, and Greek are among
the oldest of Indo-European languages that
have been found on artifacts by archaeologists.
Some branches, such as the Indo-Iranian group,
split into a complex series of subbranches,
which in turn sprouted with numerous
languages now spoken across swathes of
modern-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and
Iran. Other principal branches, such as Albanian
or Armenian, are centered on much smaller
populations. Some branches have waxed and
waned geographically: The Celtic branch—
today associated with Ireland, Wales, Scotland,
and Brittany—once comprised languages
spoken in modern-day Spain and Turkey.
From the Renaissance on, European colonial
expansion exported Indo-European languages
all over the globe into different parts of the
world. A language derived from Vulgar Latin,
Spanish, and an obscure West Germanic
language, English, became respectively the
second and third most-spoken native languages
in the world today.