a large, widespread family of languages, the surviving branches of which include Italic, Slavic, Baltic, Hellenic, Celtic, Germanic, and Indo-Iranian, spoken by about half the world's population: English, Spanish, German, Latin, Greek, Russian, Albanian, Lithuanian, Armenian, Persian, Hindi, and Hittite are all Indo-European languages.Compare family(def 14).
denoting, belonging to, or relating to a family of languages that includes English and many other culturally and politically important languages of the world: a characteristic feature, esp of the older languages such as Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, is inflection showing gender, number, and case
denoting or relating to the hypothetical parent language of this family, primitive Indo-European
denoting, belonging to, or relating to any of the peoples speaking these languages
noun
the Indo-European family of languages
Also called: primitive Indo-European, Proto-Indo-Europeanthe reconstructed hypothetical parent language of this family
a member of the prehistoric people who spoke this language
a descendant of this people or a native speaker of an Indo-European language
1814, coined by physician, physicist and Egyptologist Thomas Young (1773-1829) and first used in an article in the "Quarterly Review," from Indo-, comb. form of Greek Indos "India" + European. "Common to India and Europe," specifically in reference to the group of related languages and to the race or races characterized by their use. The alternative Indo-Germanic (1835) was coined in German 1823 (indogermanisch), based on the two peoples at the extremes of the geographic area covered by the languages, before Celtic was realized also to be an Indo-European language. After this was proved, many German scholars switched to Indo-European as more accurate, but Indo-Germanic continued in use (popularized by the titles of major works) and the predominance of German scholarship in this field made it the popular term in England, too, through the 19c. See also Aryan.
