Indo-European Studies

Logo Indogermanistik Jena

Image: Indogermanistik Jena

Indo-European Studies (also called Indo-European Linguistics, Comparative Linguistics or Historical-Comparative Linguistics) deals with the history of the Indo-European languages, one of the  most widespread language families of the world. The family includes old cultural languages as Greek, Latin, Sanskrit (Old Indic), Hittite or Old Church Slavonic as well as most European languages, Iranian languagaes and many languages of the Indian subcontinent. All these languagers can be traced back to a common protolanguage called  Proto-Indo-European. Indo-European Studies is about to find out and understand how the languages developed from this common ancestor, i.e. how their structures and words can be explained and what we can conclude from this for the cultural history of these speech communities.