Indo-European Family Tree

The Indo-European language which is the earliest known ancestor of modern English is also the ancestor of most modern Western languages. Read about how Indo-European was discovered and look at the family tree below which shows those connections. At least fourteen other families of languages have been discovered in addition to Indo-European.

Indo-European
Germanic	Celtic	Italic	Hellenic	Balto- Slavonic	Indo- Iranian
Low German Old Norse Anglo-Saxon		Latin	Classical Greek
Old English Frisian Flemish Dutch German Icelandic Norwegian Swedish Danish	Breton Manx Scots Gaelic Irish Gaelic Welsh	Romanian French Portuguese Spanish Italian	Modern Greek	Lithuanian Russian Serbo-Croat Polish Czech	Hindi Punjabi Bengali Romany Sanskrit

From the family tree you can see that a surprising number of modern languages are related by way of a common ancestor.

This does not mean that they can be understood by each other - in fact one major test of a language is that languages should be "mutually unintelligible" - but they will have some words in common, remaining from their common heritage. The word salmon is a brief case study.

You will see that modern English does not appear in the table above. This is because modern English, uniquely amongst Indo-European languages in the last thousand years, is a blend of French and Old English (with elements of Latin and Scandinavian) making it both Italic (or Romance) and Germanic. It is this blend which gives us such a large vocabulary and a flexibility to adapt to circumstances. The "mongrel" language continues to adapt while other languages try to keep out foreign influences.