The Indo-European languages are a large language family native to western Eurasia.

It comprises most of
the languages of Europe together with those of the northern Indian Subcontinent and the Iranian
Plateau. A few of these languages, such as English and Spanish, have expanded through colonialism in
the modern period and are now spoken across all continents. The Indo-European family is divided into
several branches or sub-families, the largest of which are the Indo-Iranian, Germanic, Romance, and
Balto-Slavic groups. The most populous individual languages within them are Spanish, English,
Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu), Portuguese, Bengali, Punjabi, and Russian, each with over 100 million speakers.
German, French, Marathi, Italian, and Persian have more than 50 million each. In total, 46% of the
world's population (3.2 billion) speaks an Indo-European language as a first language, by far the highest
of any language family. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to the estimate
by Ethnologue, with over two thirds (313) of them belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch.[2]

All Indo-European languages are descendants of a single prehistoric language, reconstructed as Proto-
Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic era. Its precise geographical location, the Indo-
European urheimat, is unknown and has been the object of many competing hypotheses; the most
widely accepted is the Kurgan hypothesis, which posits the urheimat to be the Pontic–Caspian steppe,
associated with the Yamnaya culture around 3000 BC. By the time the first written records appeared,
Indo-European had already evolved into numerous languages spoken across much of Europe and south-
west Asia. Written evidence of Indo-European appeared during the Bronze Age in the form of
Mycenaean Greek and the Anatolian languages, Hittite and Luwian. The oldest records are isolated
Hittite words and names – interspersed in texts that are otherwise in the unrelated Old Assyrian
language, a Semitic language – found in the texts of the Assyrian colony of Kültepe in eastern Anatolia in
the 20th century BC.[3] Although no older written records of the original Proto-Indo-Europeans remain,
some aspects of their culture and religion can be reconstructed from later evidence in the daughter
cultures.[4] The Indo-European family is significant to the field of historical linguistics as it possesses the
second-longest recorded history of any known family, after the Afroasiatic family in the form of the
Egyptian language and the Semitic languages. The analysis of the family relationships between the Indo-
European languages and the reconstruction of their common source was central to the development of
the methodology of historical linguistics as an academic discipline in the 19th century.

The Indo-European family is not known to be linked to any other language family through any more
distant genetic relationship, although several disputed proposals to that effect have been made.