Language Groups of the Indo-European Family of Languages

• Celtic languages (such as Irish, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic)

• Italic languages (such as French, Italian, Spanish and Romanian, descended from dialects of Latin)

• Germanic languages

• Slavic languages (such as Russian and Polish)

• Baltic languages (Lithuanian and Latvian)

• Indo-Iranian languages (such as Persian and Hindi)

• Individual languages that do not belong to these groups: Albanian, Greek, and Armenian

  The Germanic Branch

• North Germanic (the Scandinavian languages, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese)

• East Germanic (Gothic, now extinct but preserved in a biblical translation from the fourth century)

• West Germanic subgroups:

·           “High German” dialects (which include Modern German) 

·           “Low German” dialects (English, Dutch, Flemish and Frisian)

Living Relatives of English

• Scots (like English, Scots ultimately descends from Old English) - spoken primarily in Scotland and parts of Northern Ireland

• Frisian - spoken in the Northern Netherlands and Northwest Germany

• Modern German, Low German, Dutch and Afrikaans, which is descended from Dutch

• The North Germanic languages and Gothic are less closely related to English than the West Germanic languages