ABSTRACT
Indo-European languages were originally, a couple of millennia ago, spoken from Europe to India. Now, in postcolonial times, they are spoken all over the world. English is thus, besides being a global lingua franca, spoken in North America, Australia, parts of Africa, and elsewhere; Spanish in Central and South America (Portuguese in Brazil); French in parts of Africa, etc. According to Ethnologue,1 437 IE languages (the number is in reality approximate) are spoken by almost 3 billion people in the world. With regard to the number of speakers, this makes the IE language family the biggest in the world. Concerning the number of individual languages, IE is not the largest language family – for instance, the African Niger-Congo family with more than 1500 languages is much larger. In the world, there are around 7000 languages (this is not an exact number, since it is extremely difficult to define linguistically what a language actually is), so in this sense IE languages are less important, although IE is still one of the biggest language families. Historical reasons – primarily the concentration of economic power in Europe and later in North America, together with the culture, science, etc., that goes with it – make IE the bestknown language family in the world.
