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 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.