The Indo-European languages are a family of related languages that today are widely spoken in the Americas, Europe, and also Western and Southern Asia. Just as languages such as Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian are all descended from Latin, Indo-European languages are believed to derive from a hypothetical language known as Proto-Indo-European, which is no longer spoken. The term Indo-European is essentially geographical since it refers to the easternmost extension of the family from the Indian subcontinent to its westernmost reach in Europe. Due to that fact, this family is consider to be the biggest language family in the world, althoug it is not the biggest family concerning individual languages. Despite thie, due to historicalreasoms, it it the best known language family. The chief reason for grouping the Indo-European languages together is that they share a number of items of basic vocabulary, including grammatical affixes, whose shapes in the different languages can be related to one another by statable phonetic rules. Especially important are the shared patterns of alternation of sound. Also phonetic similarity as such is not needed to establish relationship. Indo-European languages are classified into 11 major groups: Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, Greek, Italic,Celtic, Germanic, Armenian, Tocharian, Balto-Slavic and Albanian. 1. Anatolian - spoken in Asia Minor during the 1st and 2nd millennia BCE, now it is extinct. This branch has the oldest surviving evidence of an Indo-European language 2. Indo-Iranian - this branch includes two sub-branches: Indic and Iranian. Today these languages are predominant in India, Pakistan, Iran, and its vicinity and also in areas from the Black Sea to western China. Attested circa 1400 BC. 3. Greek - is a group of dialects. The first alphabetic inscriptions have been dated back to the early 8th century BCE, which is probably the time when the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, reached their present form. There were many Greek dialects in ancient times, but because of Athenscultural supremacy in the 5th century BCE, it was the Athens dialect, called Attic, the one that became the standard literary language during the Classical period (480-323 BCE). 4. Italic - this branch was predominant in the Italian peninsula. The Italic people were not natives of Italy; they entered Italy crossing the Alps around 1000 BCE and gradually moved southward. Latin, the most famous language in this group, was originally a relatively small local language spoken by pastoral tribes living in small agricultural settlements in the centre of the Italian peninsula. The first inscriptions in Latin appeared in the 7th century BCE and by the 6th century BCE it had spread significantly. Today Romance languages are the only surviving descendants of the Italic branch. 5. Celtic - this branch contains two sub-branches: Continental Celtic and Insular Celtic. By about 600 BCE, Celtic-speaking tribes had spread from what today are southern Germany, Austria, and Western Czech Republic in almost all directions, to France, Belgium, Spain, and the British Isles, then by 400 BCE, they also moved southward into northern Italy and southeast into the Balkans and even beyond. 6. Germanic - is divided in three sub-branches: East Germanic, currently extinct; North Germanic, containing Old Norse, the ancestor of all modern Scandinavian languages; and West Germanic, containing Old English, Old Saxon, and Old High German. 7. Armenian - the origins of the Armenian-speaking people is a topic still unresolved. The Persian domination had a strong linguistic impact on Armenian, which mislead many scholars in the past to believe that Armenian actually belonged to the Iranian group. 8. Tocharian - the history of the Tocharian-speaking people is still surrounded by mystery. Most of the Tocharian texts left are translations from well-known Buddhist works, and all of these texts have been dated between the 6th and the 8th centuries CE. None of these texts speak about the Tocharians themselves. 9. Balto-Slavic - this branch contains two sub-branches: Baltic and Slavic. Only two Baltic languages survive today: Latvian and Lithuanian. A large number of Slavic languages survive today, such as Bulgarian, Czech, Croatian, Polish, Serbian, Slovak, Russian, and many others. 10. Albanian - the last branch of Indo-European languages to appear in written form. There are two hypotheses on the origin of Albanian. The first one says that Albanian is a modern descendant of Illyrian, a language which was widely spoken in the region during classical times