The Indo-European Language
Family Tree

By Jack Lynch,
Rutgers University — Newark

The chart below shows the relations among some of the languages in the Indo-European family. Though you wouldn’t think to look at the tangle of lines and arrows, the chart is very much simplified: many languages and even whole language families are left out. Use it, therefore, with caution. The coverage is most thorough, but still far from complete, in the Germanic branch, which includes English.

A key:

• Black type is used for living languages; gray type represents “dead” ones — that is, languages with no native speakers.
• I use boldface type for languages with more than 10 million speakers today, and larger boldface for those with more than 100 million.
• The dashed lines from Old Norse to Old English and from French to Middle English represent not direct descent, but the influx of vocabulary following the “Viking” and Norman Invasions.

• The diagram is English-centric — not because English has any unique place in the Indo-European family, but because it’s the subject I teach.
• I’ve grossly oversimplified everywhere.
• In the interest of readability, I’ve left out dozens of languages, including the entire Tocharian and Dacian families, the Plattdeutsch languages, and so on. There are somewhere between 400 and 500 living Indo-European languages, and scrillions of dead ones, and I can’t cover them all.
• The historical phases of many languages — Old Swedish, Middle Swedish, Modern Swedish — have been left out.
• Although each lineage is arranged chronologically, from top to bottom, you can’t compare branches for historical sequence. Albanian, way up near the top, is still spoken today; Middle English, way down near the bottom, hasn’t been spoken in half a millennium.
• The branches aren’t arranged according to geography or similarity between languages, so you can’t assume German and Hindi are closely related, or that Welsh speakers have lived close to Hittite speakers. Avestan is close to Slavic only because they fit on the page that way.
• The dotted lines show the two most important sources of large amounts of English vocabulary from outside the main West Germanic inheritance. In real life languages are always exchanging words with other languages — Celtic words borrowed into Latin, Gaulish Frankish words picked up in Old French — and English has borrowed words from almost every language on this chart. You’ll have to imagine the spiderweb of dotted lines from almost every language to almost every other, because there’s no way to do it on a diagram like this.
• I try not to take sides in disputes over language evolution, but when I have to choose one of several competing interpretations or names for a language family, I generally stick with conventional wisdom. In cases where it’s unclear whether to consider something as a language or a dialect, I’ve usually let the criterion of mutual intelligibility answer the question. When the question is more political than linguistic — Scots versus English, Flemish versus Dutch — I’ve chosen to stay silent.

In short: I’m not trying to make the definitive statement of the relationships among all the Indo-European languages, only to give my students some idea of the origins of the English language, and its relations to other familiar languages — along with a few less familiar ones.

If you’re interested in using this chart, you’re granted free non-exclusive use rights provided it’s attributed to me. And if you want the original PowerPoint file to make your own modifications, hit me up.

And here’s the 2014 version, also available in a PDF version.

Comments and corrections are always welcome.