Most languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family.Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language; within Indo-European, the three largest phyla are Romance, Germanic, and Slavic with more than 200 million speakers each, between them accounting for close to 90% of Europeans.

The Germanic umlaut (sometimes called i-umlaut or i-mutation) is a type of linguistic umlaut in which a back vowel changes to the associated front vowel or a front vowel becomes closer to /i/ when the following syllable contains /i/, /iː/, or /j/.. It took place separately in various Germanic languages starting around AD 450 or 500 and affected all of the early languages except Gothic.