ABSTRACT
By the term Indo -European we are referring to a family of languages which by the time of the second millennium bce were spoken over a large part of Europe and parts of southwestern and southern Asia. Indo-European is essentially a geographical term: it refers to the easternmost (India) and westernmost (Europe) pre-colonial expansion of the family at the time it was proven to be a linguistic group by scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (the term was first used in 1813). Of course, modern developments which have spread Indo-European languages around the world now suggest another name for the family, but the term Indo-European (German Indogermanisch) is now well rooted in the scholarly tradition.
