Linguistic and Ethnic Diversity in Europe

The overwhelming majority of Europe's roughly 750 million inhabitants speak languages belonging to the Indo-European family, which linguists trace back to a hypothesized proto-language spoken several thousand years before the common era, likely somewhere in the Pontic-Caspian steppe north of the Black and Caspian seas, according to the widely accepted Kurgan hypothesis first developed by the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. Within Europe, this family branches into several major groups: the Romance languages, descended from the vernacular Latin of the Roman Empire, including French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian; the Germanic languages, encompassing English, German, Dutch, and the North Germanic Scandinavian languages of Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Icelandic; and the Slavic languages, spoken across most of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, themselves subdivided into West Slavic tongues such as Polish and Czech, East Slavic tongues such as Russian and Ukrainian, and South Slavic tongues such as Serbian, Croatian, and Bulgarian.