A modern scholary name assigned by scholars to denote the theoretical ancestral population of most of the European countries, as well as those of northern India and Iran.

The term, however, is more philologically valid than anything else and has almost no true racial value. As Indic, Iranian, and most European languages (with the exception of Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, and Basque) display morphological and phonological, as well as grammatic similarities, it has been theorized that they all form a single language family, called "Indo-European" by scholars. These also include the now extinct languages of Tocharian and Anatolian languages such as Hittite and Lycian. Armenian is also an independent branch of Indo-European.

It should be noted that not all languages of India and Iran are part of this language family. In India, the Dravidian language family (which includes Tamil, Telegu, and Kannada) are not Indo-European. In Iran, Turkish (Ural-Altan) and Arabic (Semitic), as well as Brahui (Dravidian) are not part of the language family. Outside the boundaries of Iran and India, languages such as Urdu, Pashto, Tajiki Persian, Ossetic (spoken in Russian and Georgian Ossetia) and many other minor languages of Afghanistan and even western China are part of this family of languages. Also, as a consequence of European colonialism, Indo-European languages have broken out of the boundaries of Europe into the New World and other continents. At present, Indo-European is the lar...