The Indo-European family of cognate language s spoken for at
least the last 3,000 years originally over most of Europe and
extending into Asia as far south as northern India and as far
east as Chinese Turkistan . The Indo-European language s are
thought to have originated in a language which has been called
Proto-Indo-European , spoken at some distant time in the past,
considerably before 2000 BC. The main divisions to which the
Proto-Indo-European language eventually split are the Baltic
languages, the Celtic branch, the Germanic languages, the Greek
branch, the Indic branch, the Italic branch, and the Slavic
languages, as well as the ancient Anatolian languages, and
Tocharian. In addition to these, Albanian and Armenian form
distinct members of the family. It constitutes the most
extensively spoken group of languages in the world and virtually
all the modern languages of Europe belong to this group.