We can not say what language is/was closest to Proto-Indo-European, but it seems that several Indo-Aryan and some Iranian and slavic but also greece and the extinct Anatolian branch, was closest. According to a vocabulary study, the ancient Indo-Aryan languages have most similarities with Proto-Indo-European.
| Sanskrit |
|---|
| Revival | There are no native speakers of Sanskrit. |
| Language family | Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Sanskrit |
| Early form | Vedic Sanskrit |
| Writing system | Originally orally transmitted. No attested native script; from 1st-millennium CE, written in various Brahmic scripts. |
The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) had eight or nine cases, three numbers (singular, dual and plural) and probably originally two genders (animate and neuter), with the animate later splitting into the masculine and the feminine.
A proto-language, in the tree model of historical linguistics, is a language, usually hypothetical or reconstructed, and usually unattested, from which a number of attested known languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family.
Historical linguists can reconstruct many words of proto-Indo-European from their descendants. This steppe theory, favored by many linguists, holds that the proto-Indo-European speakers then spread their language to Europe, India and western China, whether by conquest or the appeal of their pastoral economy.
The Indo-European family is significant to the field of historical linguistics as it possesses the second-longest recorded history of any known family, after the Afroasiatic family in the form of the Egyptian language and the Semitic languages.
English Language Learners Definition of Indo-European: of or relating to a group of languages that includes many of the languages spoken in Europe, in the parts of the world colonized by Europeans, and in parts of Asia. See the full definition for Indo-European in the English Language Learners Dictionary.
The Proto-Indo-Europeans were a hypothetical prehistoric ethnolinguistic group of Eurasia who spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the ancestor of the Indo-European languages according to linguistic reconstruction. The Proto-Indo-Europeans likely lived during the late Neolithic, or roughly the 4th millennium BC.
The common ancestor of English, Latin, Greek, Russian, Gaelic, Hindi, and many other languages spoken in Europe and India is known as Proto-Indo-European, whereas the more recent common ancestor of just English, German, Dutch, Norwegian and the other Germanic languages is known as Proto-Germanic.
Because Arabs speak a SEMITE language belonging to the Afroasiatic language group and Northern Indians speak an Indo-European language. Because Indo-European as a concept is about language, not anthropological characteristics.
