Languages, Geography of

Indo-European Languages

By far the largest and most widespread of the major language families is the Indo-European, a group first identified by the famous linguist William Jones, a British judge stationed in India, in the 18th century. Starting with the migrations of the so-called Aryans around 1500 BC to 2000 BC, perhaps as a result of their domestication of the horse, Indo-Europeans moved in two directions from their homeland near the Caucuses Mountains. (Indeed, names such as Ireland and Iran are derived from the name of this tribe). One group moved east into Northern India, their languages becoming the basis of the Sanskrit-based Indic languages, such as Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Gujarati, Bihari, Marathi, Sinhala, and Nepali. Others remained in the Middle East, where their languages eventually became the Iranic family, including Farsi (formerly Persian), Kurdish, Armenian, and Pashto in Afghanistan. The other major branch of Indo-Europeans moved into Europe, where they diverged into several groups. The languages of these groups include the Latin-based Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, Romansch, and Romanian), which arose during the disintegration of the Roman Empire. Greek and Albanian form separate categories in their own right. Farther north, the Germanic languages include German, Dutch, the Scandinavian tongues, and English. Celtic, an early branch once widespread throughout Western Europe, today consists of Scottish and Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Breton in Western France, and extinct tongues such as Cornish; this branch is in danger of disappearing. In Eastern Europe and Russia, the Slavic branch includes Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian. The Baltic group of Lithuanian and Latvian is another branch.

With the expansion of Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British colonialism, Indo-European languages were carried throughout much of the world, becoming dominant throughout the New World, Australia, and New Zealand (Figure 1). Today, about half of the world speaks an Indo-European tongue of one sort or another. English, in particular, empowered and diffused by the British and American empires, has become the lingua franca of more people than any other tongue (when second-language speakers are included). English is unquestionably the world's dominant language in commerce, trade, scholarly publications, airlines, international finance, and tourism. The rise of the nation-state as well as the invention of printing had enormous effects on the social and spatial structure of language. One dialect—typically that of dominant elites, whether in Tuscany, London, Madrid, or Paris—became privileged over others, expanding into national languages, annihilating local differences in vocabulary and pronunciation but integrating diverse groups linguistically into a common group. The newly printed languages were fundamental for the emergence of a national consciousness because they geographically connected speakers of, for example, local varieties of “Englishes,” “Spanishes,” and “Germans” and made known to them the existence of others who shared the same language group. These newly printed languages forged dialects together into national languages. Printing thus constituted a prime dimension in the time-space compression that created modern nation-states.

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