Indo-European languages Family of languages spoken throughout all of Europe and sw and s Asia, and used in all the areas of European settlement, such as Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, the USA, and Latin America. It consists of the following subgroups: the Germanic languages, the Celtic languages and the Indo-Iranian (including Persian, Avestan, and the Indic languages – Sanskrit, Pali, and modern Hindi). Other languages and groups in the family are Armenian, Albanian, Greek, the Italic languages (including Latin and its descendants, the Romance languages), the Baltic group (including Latvian and Lithuanian), and the Slavic group (including Old Church Slavonic, Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, Croatian, and others). About half the world's population speaks an Indo-European language.

Indo-European of or relating to the family of languages spoken over the greater part of Europe and Asia as far as northern India.

The Indo-European languages have a history of over 3,000 years. Their unattested, reconstructed ancestor, Proto-Indo-European, is believed to have been spoken well before 4000 bc in a region somewhere to the north or south of the Black Sea. The family comprises twelve branches: Indic (including Sanskrit and its descendants), Iranian, Anatolian (including Hittite and other extinct languages), Armenian, Hellenic (Greek), Albanian (or Illyrian), Italic (including Latin and the Romance languages), Celtic, Tocharian (an extinct group from central Asia), Germanic (including English, German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages), Baltic, and Slavic (including Russian, Czech, Bulgarian, and Serbo-Croat).

In·do-Eu·ro·pe·an • adj. of or relating to the family of languages spoken over the greater part of Europe and Asia as far as northern India. ∎ another term for Proto-Indo-European.• n. 1. the ancestral Proto-Indo-European language. ∎  the Indo-European family of languages.2. a speaker of an Indo-European language, esp. Proto-Indo-European.