Can you speak Indo-European? In a sense, you do speak it. English is part of the Indo-European family of languages.
For the last two centuries, linguists have been studying similarities and differences among languages. They have divided most of the world’s languages into several families of related languages. English is part of an extended family called Indo-European. It includes most of the languages of Europe, as well as 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, and scholars can only guess what Proto-Indo-European was like. They do that by looking at the languages that are descended from it.
