Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are a language family of several hundred related languages and dialects.

Quotes

• They would not have it, they would not believe that there could be any community of origin between the people of Athens and Rome, and the so-called Niggers of India. The classical scholars scouted the idea, and I still remember the time, when I was a student at Leipzig and begun to study Sanskrit, with what contempt any remarks on Sanskrit or comparative grammar were treated by my teachers ... No one ever was for a time so completely laughed down as Professor Bopp, when he first published his Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin and Gothic. All hands were against him.
  • Max Müller (1883), quoted by E. F. Bryant & L. L. Patton, The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History (Routledge, 2005), p. 472

• The vast interior of Eurasia is a linguistic spread zone—a genetic and typological bottleneck where many genetic lines go extinct, structural types tend to converge, a single language or language family spreads out over a broad territorial range, and one language family replaces another over a large range every few millennia. The linguistic geography of the central and western grasslands, from at least the Neolithic until early modern times, has consisted of an overall westward trajectory of language spreads... The central Eurasian spread zone... was part of a standing pattern whereby languages were drawn into the spread zone, spread westward, and were eventually succeeded by the next spreading family.
  • Johanna Nichols, in Archaeology and Language, Vol. I, ed. Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs (Routledge, 1997), quoted by S. Talageri, The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis (New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 2000)