1 Most languages in Europe and northern India are members of the Indo-European family of languages. 2 The parent language was probably spoken about 5,000 years ago. 3 Today, many scholars accept the steppes of southern Russia as the original home of this language family. 4 Migrations in the third millennium B.C. must have separated the people from each other and must have created today's different languages. 5 Although there are many speakers of Indo-European languages today, some Indo-European languages are now extinct. 6 Current Indo-European languages like Greek, Italian, German, Albanian, Armenian, and English are very different, but they share some common features in their sound systems, grammatical systems, and vocabulary. 7 If language scholars today can reconstruct the parent language, language learning may become easier.