Can you speak Indo-European? In a way, you do speak it. English is part of the Indo-European family of languages.
For the last two centuries, linguists have been studying how languages are alike and not alike. They have divided most of the world’s languages into several families. English is part of a big family called Indo-European, which includes most of the languages of Europe—plus Iranian, Kurdish, Hindi/Urdu, Bengali, and other languages of the Indian subcontinent. The parent language of the Indo-European family is called Proto-Indo-European. There are no written or spoken remains of it. Scholars can only guess what it was like by looking at the languages that came from it.
