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Most of the major languages belonging to language branches and groups in Europe, and western and southern Asia, belong to the Indo-European language family. This is thus the biggest language family in the world by number of mother tongue speakers (but not by number of languages: by this measure it is only the 3rd or 5th biggest).
The word American is sometimes questioned because the people referred to resided in the Americas before they were so named. As of 1995, according to the US Census Bureau, 50% of people who identified as Indigenous preferred the term American Indian, 37% preferred Native American, and the remainder preferred other terms or had no preference. [18]
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, the overwhelming majority of Europe, and the Iranian plateau. Some European languages of this family— Dutch , English , French , Portuguese , Russian , and Spanish —have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across ...
The primary competitor is the Anatolian hypothesis advanced by Colin Renfrew, [81] [22] which states that the Indo-European languages began to spread peacefully into Europe from Asia Minor (modern Turkey) from around 7000 BCE with the Neolithic Revolution's advance of farming by demic diffusion (spread via migration). [80]
Friedrich notes that even among those Indo-European languages with basic OV word order, none of them are rigidly OV. He also notes that these non-rigid OV languages mainly occur in parts of the IE area that overlap with OV languages from other families (such as Uralic and Dravidian), whereas VO is predominant in the central parts of the IE area ...
A color-coded map of most languages used throughout Europe. There are over 250 languages indigenous to Europe, and most belong to the Indo-European language family. [1] [2] Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language.
The Romance languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, comprise all languages that descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. The Romance languages have more than 700 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in the Americas , Europe , and Africa , as well as in many smaller regions scattered through the world.
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...