All the Indo-European languages share a very large number of words and of grammatical structures. While for someone who has not studied languages, German, Span

All the Indo-European languages share a very large number of words and of grammatical structures. While for someone who has not studied languages, German, Spanish and Russian may appear as very different languages, for someone familiar with the evolution of the Indo-European languages it is easy to recognize the word correspondences between these languages, even when seeing some words for the first time. The same is true for any other group of languages that have separated at most a few thousand years ago, so they are still recognizable as belonging to the same family. In all languages for which writing has become frequently used, that has slowed significantly the divergence of the languages, at least in their written form, when divergence may have occurred between pronunciations.