Which language family includes Hindi, Bengali, Persian, and English?

The Indo-European language family includes Hindi, Bengali, Persian, and English.

Indo-European is one of the world’s largest language families by number of speakers. Its branches include Germanic, Romance, Indo-Iranian, Slavic, Celtic, Baltic, Hellenic, Armenian, and Albanian, along with the extinct Anatolian and Tocharian branches.

The family was identified through systematic comparisons of vocabulary and grammar among languages such as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. Scholars generally reconstruct a prehistoric ancestor called Proto-Indo-European, although no direct written record of that language survives.

The family’s name refers to its broad historical distribution from Europe into parts of South and Central Asia. Shared ancestry does not mean that modern languages are mutually understandable: English and Bengali, for example, have diverged for thousands of years and differ greatly in sound, grammar, and vocabulary.