Indo-European

node · earth · Europe, western and southern Asia; by later colonisation, worldwide

The family that stretches from Ireland to Bengal and now, through colonisation, across the Americas and Oceania — the first to be demonstrated, the most intensively reconstructed, and the yardstick against which every other family's evidence is judged. Its principal branches include Indo-Iranian, Greek, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Armenian, Albanian, and two extinct branches that transformed the field when they were read: Anatolian, of which Hittite is the best attested, and Tocharian, recorded in Buddhist manuscripts from the Tarim Basin. The family is not distinguished by size — Niger-Congo and Austronesian contain more languages — but by depth of documentation. It has continuous written attestation over three and a half thousand years, which allows reconstructions to be checked against later-discovered texts rather than merely asserted, and it is that checkability, more than any property of the languages, that made Indo-European the laboratory in which the comparative method was built. Its homeland and dispersal date remain the most actively argued questions in the field.