From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.
And with this episode,
I want to follow in what has become a kind of Lexicon Valley tradition and do a language family show.
Now, usually when I do these,
I pick a family that most of us might consider exotic because it's not Indo-European.
That's the family that English belongs to.
I generally refer to Indo-European in passing.
It's almost a Homeric epithet on this show that I talk about proto-Indo-European,
the language that emerged on the steps of what is now Ukraine.
It's time to actually examine what this family Indo-European is,
especially because it's easy to think that it's things that it isn't,
especially from the perspective of English.
So we're going to do a very special episode,
i.e. a two-part episode about Indo-European, because there is a lot to know.
There are many interesting things about this family.
Indo-European.
This is a family that has the most spread across this globe of any of the several dozen,
if not several hundred,
depending on how you count it, whether you're a lumper or a splitter language families in the world.
Three billion people.