The Indo-European Family of Languages Essay

Language is constantly changing. As cultures interact the language used by the culture also shifts
to accommodate these changes. Speech is a part of language, with them, we can communicate
with other people across cultures. The changing of language also means that speech will alter as
a result. The speech produced by different cultures will sound different from any other culture
and the dialect can change depending on the interaction. Even though the speech pattern and
dialect changed, some languages are usually recognizable by certain features that were once the
same language. For example, English and German are similar in their words, like milch and milk,
brot and bread, and fleisch and flesh. Because of these changes, we were led to believe that
languages in Europe and Asia are identical at once.

The leading discovery of that hypothesis is the discovery of Sanskrit. Sanskrit is the classical
language of people in South Asia, specifically India. After research, Sanskrit is to be found
almost identical to the Europe language, like German. Jacob Grimm, one of the German
philologist at the time explain that a p in Indo-European, preserved as such in Latin and Greek,
was changed to an f in the Germanic languages. The term for these changes are usually called
Indo-Germanic, derived from the German philologist and the emphasis in their language. The
term is now widely called Indo-European because of the more branches or geographical extent
of the family.

The branches of the Indo-European fall into eleven principal groups: Indian, Iranian, Armenian,
Hellenic, Albanian, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, Hittite, and Tocharian. Based on all
the research, it suggest that Indo-European people's language continuity doesn’t imply biological
descent, and some people might abandon their language and adapt to another. The adaptation
occurs by the conqueror language or the conquered language. In conclusion, the people in the
Indo-European family remain elusive, with evidence suggesting a wide ethnic diversity among
its speakers.