Indo-European Branches

The Indo-European language family is the largest and most thoroughly studied language family in the world by number of speakers, uniting most of the languages of Europe with Iranian, Indic and several extinct branches of Anatolia and Central Asia under a single reconstructed ancestor, Proto-Indo-European, spoken roughly six thousand years ago on the Pontic-Caspian steppe. This group holds every Eurasian Language Families member whose own sourced description identifies it as Indo-European or as a member of one of its recognized branches. Because the branch alone already runs past a hundred members, it is split into eight child groups below by conventional branch (Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Romance and Italic, Celtic, Indo-Iranian, Hellenic, the extinct Anatolian and Tocharian branches, and Armenian with Albanian and the fragmentary Paleo-Balkan languages), each named for the branch or cluster of branches it covers.