Lexical Similarities Between Different Branches of Indo-European

The Indo-European language family is the largest group of languages on the planet, with English, French, Russian, Greek and Hindi all included in its ranks. I used Dyen et al.’s (1992) dataset of lexical distances between 82 Indo-European languages to investigate how similar the vocabularies of the different branches (major groups) of languages are. The chart above groups those languages according to genetic branches and calculates the average similarities between the different languages of these larger groups; linguists usually care about how close two given langauges are to a common ancestor (their genetic relatedness), but my project only compares how similar their common words are. European branches are generally more similar to each other than they are to Asian branches, despite being no more closely related.