Language Families—Indo-European

The Indo-European family is spoken in most of Europe, as well as eastward in Iran and India. The family began in the southern steppes of modern Russia in about 4000 B.C., most likely, and now consists of various subfamilies. Each subfamily teaches lessons about how language changes. For example, in Germanic, bizarre changes in consonants created the difference between such words as pater, père, and padre and our own father. Some of the branches have stayed closer to what the Indo-European ancestral language was like, such as the Slavic one containing Russian, while others have morphed so far that they were classified only rather recently as part of the family (Albanian).