English belongs to the Indo-European → Germanic → West Germanic language family — making it, at the deepest Indo-European level, a distant relative of Hindi and Sanskrit (also Indo-European, via the Indic branch), but far more closely related to German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages.

This means English and the Indo-Aryan languages covered elsewhere in this syllabus share a very ancient common ancestor (Proto-Indo-European) but diverged thousands of years before either reached its modern form.

• ›This is a useful contrast with Arabic (Semitic, unrelated to Indo-European entirely) and Persian (Indo-European but Iranian branch, closer to Indo-Aryan than English is)
• ›English's Germanic core vocabulary was massively supplemented by French and Latin vocabulary after the 1066 Norman Conquest