languages and linguistics
concepts
An extragalactic visitor examining the languages of the world today would be quickly struck by the many close similarities in grammar and vocabulary among French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian—sufficient for speakers of one language to understand, with some difficulty, the others—and might wonder how that situation came about. Armed with a knowledge of history, we could tell our visitor that the areas in which these languages are spoken were originally settled by speakers of Latin as the Roman Empire expanded, and we can trace, through historical documents, the gradual emergence of regional differences that led from Latin to the modern languages. [Source: Encyclopedia of Bilingual Education; Indo-European Languages]
Indo-European languages