Family formed by hundreds of akin languages, among which most of the European languages (including the Romance languages and the Germanic languages), allegedly descended from a common ancestral language, denominated Indo-European, which would have been spoken about 5,000 years BC, thus before the invention of writing, therefore has never been documented, and has been reconstructed by deduction from the comparison between the phonetics, vocabulary and grammar of its daughter languages: Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Avestan, Slavic languages, Germanic languages, etc.