Indo-Iranian Languages
The Indo-Iranian languages (also known as Indo-Iranic languages or collectively the Aryan languages) constitute the largest and southeasternmost extant branch of the Indo-European language family.
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They include over 300 languages, spoken by around 1.5 billion speakers, predominantly in South Asia, West Asia and parts of Central Asia.
| Indo-Iranian | |
|---|---|
| Indo-Iranic (Aryan) | |
| Geographic distribution | South, Central, West Asia and the Caucasus |
| Linguistic classification | Indo-European
|
| Proto-language | Proto-Indo-Iranian |
| Subdivisions | |
| ISO 639-5 | iir |
| Glottolog | indo1320 |
 Distribution of the Indo-Iranian languages | |
The common reconstructed ancestor of all of the languages in this family is called Proto-Indo-Iranian, also known as Common Aryan, which is hypothesized to have been spoken in approximately the late 3rd millennium BC in an area of the Eurasian steppe that borders the Ural River on the west, the Tian Shan on the east (where the Indo-Iranians took over the area occupied by the earlier Afanasevo culture), and Transoxiana and the Hindu Kush on the south. The three branches of the Indo-Iranian languages are Indo-Aryan, Iranian, and Nuristani. A fourth independent branch, Dardic, was previously posited, but recent scholarship in general places Dardic languages as archaic members of the Indo-Aryan branch.
The areas with Indo-Iranian languages stretch from Europe (Romani) and the Caucasus (Ossetian, Tat and Talysh), down to Mesopotamia (Kurdish languages, Gorani, Kurmanji Dialect continuum), eastern Anatolia (Zaza) and Iran (Persian), eastward to Xinjiang (Sarikoli) and Assam (Assamese), and south to Sri Lanka (Sinhala) and the Maldives (Maldivian), with branches stretching as far out as Oceania and the Caribbean for Fiji Hindi and Caribbean Hindustani respectively. Furthermore, there are large diaspora communities of Indo-Iranian speakers in northwestern Europe (the United Kingdom), North America (United States, Canada), Australia, South Africa, and the Persian Gulf Region (United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia).
The number of distinct languages listed in Ethnologue are 312, while those recognised in Glottolog are 320. The Indo-Iranian language with the largest number of native speakers is Hindustani language (Hindi-Urdu).
Etymology
The term Indo-Iranian languages refers to the spectrum of Indo-European languages spoken in the Southern Asian region of Eurasia, spanning from the Indian subcontinent (where the Indic branch is spoken, also called Indo-Aryan) up to the Iranian Plateau (where the Iranic branch is spoken).
This branch is also known as Aryan languages, referring to the languages spoken by Aryan peoples, where the term Aryan is the ethnocultural self-designation of ancient Indo-Iranians. But in modern-day, Western scholars avoid the term Aryan since World War II, owing to the perceived negative connotation associated with Aryanism.
References
Further reading
- "Contact and change in the diversification of the Indo-Iranic languages" (PDF). Dr. Russell Gray, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution.
- Baly, Joseph (1897). Eur-Aryan roots: With their English derivatives and the corresponding words in the cognate languages compared and systematically arranged. Vol. 1. London: Keegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Company.
- Chakrabarti, Byomkes (1994). A comparative study of Santali and Bengali. Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi & Co. ISBN 81-7074-128-9.
- Kümmel, Martin Joachim (2018). "The morphology of Indo-Iranian". In Klein, Jared; Joseph, Brian; Fritz, Matthias (eds.). Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics. Vol. 3. De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 1888–1924. doi:10.1515/9783110542431-032. S2CID 135347276.
- Kümmel, Martin Joachim (2020). "Substrata of Indo-Iranic and related questions". In Garnier, Romain (ed.). Loanwords and substrata: Proceedings of the colloquium held in Limoges (5th-7th June, 2018). Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck. pp. 237–277. ISBN 978-3-85124-751-0.
- Kümmel, Martin Joachim (2022). "Indo-Iranian". In Olander, Thomas (ed.). The Indo-European Language Family: A Phylogenetic Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 246–268. doi:10.1017/9781108758666.014. ISBN 978-1-108-75866-6.
- Lubotsky, Alexander (2018). "The phonology of Proto-Indo-Iranian". In Klein, Jared; Joseph, Brian; Fritz, Matthias (eds.). Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics. Vol. 3. De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 1875–1888. doi:10.1515/9783110542431-031. hdl:1887/63480. S2CID 165490459.
- Pinault, Georges-Jean (2005). "Contacts religieux et culturels des Indo-Iraniens avec la civilisation de l'Oxus". Comptes rendus des séances de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (in French). 149 (1): 213–257. doi:10.3406/crai.2005.22848.
- Pinault, Georges-Jean (2008). "La langue des Scythes et le nom des Arimaspes". Comptes rendus des séances de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (in French). 152 (1): 105–138. doi:10.3406/crai.2008.92104.
- Sims-Williams, Nicholas, ed. (2002). Indo-Iranian Languages and Peoples. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-726285-6.
External links
- Swadesh lists of Indo-Iranian basic vocabulary words (from Wiktionary's Swadesh-list appendix)
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