INDO-GERMANIC LANGUAGES, often called ARYAN, or sometimes N The name given to the great cognate group of tongues spoken by the kindred peoples of Southern and Southwestern Asia and Europe., and extemline. from India as far as the people of Cermanie blood have spread. (See ARYAN.) This great group is quite distinct from the Semitic family of languages. from the forms of speech spoken by the Alongolian tribes, and from the va rious other recognized °Toni), of tongues which are distributed over the world. The question as to the situation of the primitive home of the Indo-Ger manic peoples has been much diseussed. The present tendency is to locate the original Ind°• Cermanic habitat in Central or Northern Europe rather than in Asia. Various theories have been advanced, especially a generation ago, to account for the present distribution of these languages. The genetic arrangement of the tongues in a genealogical tree by Schleicher and other schol ars, or views as to migratory movements or dissemination, like Johannes Schmidt's 'wave theory,' will be found referred to in most hooks relating to linguistics and comparative philology. The kinship of these languages has been scien tifically proved by the family features and gen eral likeness in their structure. In point of age they go back as far as the literary monuments of the Vedas.
The division of the Indo-Germanic peoples as represented by the various branches of speech is generally considered to be eightfold, as follows: (1) Indo-Iranian or Aryan proper, the ancient and modern languages of India and Persia; (2) Armenian, forming a sort of bridge between Asia and Europe; (3) Grecian or Hellenic, with its modern representatives in the tongues of North ern Greece and the Peloponnesus; (4) Albanian, a more modern representative of the ancient Illyrian; (5) Italic, the Latin, with its modern descendants in the Romance tongues; (6) Celtic or Keltie, originally occupying the west of Eu rope, but now confined chiefly to the British Isles, and of particular interest to the historical student of English and French philology; (7) Germanic, the important group to which the Anglo-Saxon, English, the German, and other Teutonic tongues belong; and lastly (8), the BaIto-Slavic group, the chief representative of which is the modern Russian. The various subdivisions of these lan
guage divisions, together with their branches or dialects, will be found under the respective titles. Besides these there are some sporadic traces or representatives of other Indo-Germanie idioms which are not included in the list because the frag ments are too scanty or too scattered to allow a de termination in detail of the real character of the speech. Such are the Phrygian, which has affini ties with the Armenian, or again the Messapian, which may be connected with the Albanian, or still further, the Macedonian, Gallic, Burgundian, or the like.
With reference to the general features, the Indo-Germanic languages are an inflectional group of tongues, sprung from a common ancestor no longer in existence. They have certain marked or distinctive features or variations of sound and accentuation that are more or less common to all, and they show a general similarity in struc ture as to roots, affixes, composite forms, with kindred variations of nouns, adjectives, pro nouns, and verbs through eight eases, three num bers, including a dual, and a variety of moods and tenses, together with certain common phe nomena in syntax and word-order. For a full bib liography, reference may be made to the standard work on the subject, Brugmann, comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages (5 vols., London, 1888-95). translated from the German without the three volumes on syntax by Delbriiek. A second and revised edition of the original German work began to appear at Strass burg in 1897. Consult also the authorities re ferred to under ARYAN; INFLECTION; LANGUAGE; PHILOLOGY; PHONETIC LAws; and also the ar ticles on ALBANIAN LANGUAGE; ARMENIAN LAN GUAGE AND LITERATURE; CELTIC LANGUAGES; GREEK LANGUAGE; INDO-IRANIAN LANGUAGES;