French sounds romantic, German aggressive, Italian passionate – we associate a lot with languages. Our mother tongue is part of our culture, our childhood and our customs. Language shapes our identity, it influences our way of thinking. It creates community and a sense of belonging. Even within the same language, dialects and slang reveal your background or even political views.

European languages are as diverse as the European people, nevertheless, they still share history. It is unknown how exactly the Indo-European languages evolved. Some say they originate from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, located in today’s south Russia and southeast Ukraine. In this theory, the language was spread by mounted nomadic tribes around 5000 years ago. Some others say it originated in Anatolia around 9000 years ago and was spread by agrarian cultures.

In any case, there is the idea of a “Proto-Indo-European” language, one from which all the Indo-European languages evolved, including Romanic, Slavic, Germanic, and Iranian languages. There is no written proof of “Proto-Indo-European”, meaning it is a reconstructed language. It was traced back from the similarities found in modern and dead or extinct Indo-European languages, which have written proof such as Latin and Gothic, an east-Germanic language.

Until today, the Indo-European languages share many similarities, even if it might not be obvious at first glance. The more closely the languages are related, the more similarities they have, both in grammar and vocabulary. 

More closely related languages can be considered as a branch of the Indo-European languages. Some branches, like the Anatolian, are extinct. Today, there are Germanic, Romanic, Balto-Slavic, Greek, Albanian, Armenian, Indian, Iranian, and Celtic languages.

In the same branch, similarities are quite obvious, for example in the Romanic languages, which developed out of Latin. Therefore, there are similar words like the French word “frère” and the Italian word “fratello”. On the other hand, the English word “brother” resembles the German word “Bruder”. 

There are also lots of words that are “borrowed” from old Greek or Latin, which occur in many Indo-European languages. For example, the Macedonian word “автомобил“ („avtomobil“), the German word “Auto” and the old French word “automobile” are nearly the same, all originating from Greek.

The word “brother” is also a good example of similarities between different branches, in this case Germanic, Slavic, and Romanic languages, even if the words look different at first. 

Germanic: “brother”, “Bruder”, “broder”

Romanic: “frater”, “fratello”

Slavic: “brat”, “брат“

Compared between the Latin “frater”, the English “brother”, and the Russian “брат“ (brat), the biggest differences are the letters “f” and “t” in the Romanic, versus “b” and “t”, “th” and “d” in Germanic and Slavic languages. This can be explained through the various vowel shifts that happened in the Indo-European languages. This first vowel shift happened during the Latin vowel shift, where the Latin languages changed the letter “b” to “f”. On the other hand, during the Germanic vowel shift, the letter “t” changed to “th”. Later in German, “th” became “d” because of the German vowel shift.

There are also grammatical commonalities between the Indo-European languages. For example, there is a widespread passive form, built with a linking verb and the past participle. 

English: The wall is painted.

Polish: Ściana jest pomalowana.

French: Le mur est peint.

Albanian: Muri është pikturuar.

This kind of passive is commonly and only used in Indo-European languages like Romanic, Germanic, Slavic, some Indic, Iranian and Celtic and other languages of the Balkans like Albanian.

Despite all the similarities, the different Indo-European languages divide the cultures. Sometimes, speaking the same language brings more together than national borders. There are languages spoken in more than one country and countries, where more than one language is spoken within. Speaking or not speaking a language can determine power, which is why it is important to recognize the languages of minorities. 

Romani for example is spoken in a lot of countries. Nevertheless, it is only employed as an official language on a local level in the Šuto Orizari Municipality within the administrative region of Skopje and in Kosovo. Otherwise, it is often recognized as a minority language.

Languages show us how cultures go beyond borders. This way, they also show us history like the Romanic languages, which were spread because of the Roman Empire. A “European” language was never established. And while “Proto-Indo-European” might sound like a way to overcome the divisions within Europe, there are good reasons not to force an Indo-European language. Besides the logistical part, no constructed language ever developed into a widely spoken language. The best attempt was “Esperanto”, a language invented in Poland, which was designed to be easy to learn for everyone, based on a lot of, mostly European languages. It was supposed to be a neutral, second language for everyone to communicate. This way, no one has the advantage of a native speaker. Today, there are between 30.000 and 2 million speakers: even this concept wasn’t good enough to break through, because it was never an official language. Instead, English is the most spoken traffic language.

Nevertheless, Indo-European languages share more than we might think. This is something to remember.

Johanna Krautkrämer

Sources:

Wissenschaft.de – Ursprünge der indoeuropäischen Sprachfamilie

Youtube.com – What If European Countries Were Divided By Language? 

Youtube.com – Europas Sprachen 

Youtube.com – Das Vernersche Gesetz 

Britannica – Indo-European languages | Definition, Map, Characteristics, & Facts

Dwds.de – ›Bruder‹ in: Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen

Youtube.com – Standard Average European: The European Sprachbund 

Wikipedia.org – Esperanto

Wikipedia.org – European languages

Wikipedia.org – Romani language