Indo-Iranian languages

Indo-Iranian languages, group of languages constituting the easternmost major branch of the Indo-European family of languages; only the Tocharian languages are found farther east. Scholarly consensus holds that the Indo-Iranian languages include the Iranian and Indo-Aryan (Indic) language groups. Some scholars suggest that the Nūristānī and Bangani languages belong in the Indo-Iranian group as well.

Distribution

In the early 21st century, Indo-Iranian languages were spoken by nearly one billion individuals, most of whom resided in a broad region of southwestern and southern Asia. Speakers of modern Iranian languages number between 150 and 200 million; Persian, Pashto, and Kurdish are the most widely spoken of these languages. Speakers of modern Indo-Aryan languages number more than 800 million persons; Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, and Urdu are the most widely spoken of these languages. Among the Indo-European languages, only Greek and Hittite possess written records older than those of Indo-Iranian.

The Indo-Iranian languages have been used in both administrative and literary contexts. Old Persian was the administrative language of the early Achaemenian dynasty, dating from the 6th century bce, and an eastern Middle Indo-Aryan dialect was the language of the chancellery of the Mauryan emperor Aśoka in the Indian subcontinent in the mid-3rd century bce. The Indo-Iranian languages have also been used in the literature of some of the world’s great religions: Indo-Aryan for Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism and Iranian for Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism. The oldest Zoroastrian texts are in dialects included under the name Avestan. Commerce, conquest, and religion spread the influence of these languages. Indo-Aryan languages, for example, penetrated deep into Southeast Asia; lexical borrowings in Indonesia, Thailand, and other areas and Sanskrit texts in Cambodia reflect this influence.

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Origins

The original location of the Indo-Iranian group was probably to the north of modern Afghanistan, east of the Caspian Sea, in the area that is now Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, where Iranian languages are still spoken. From there, some Iranians migrated to the south and west, the Indo-Aryans to the south and east. From geographical references in the earliest Indo-Aryan literary document, the Ṛigveda (“The Veda Composed in Verses,” c. 1500 bce), it is clear that the earliest settlement of Indo-Aryans was in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent. Migration did not take place at once. It is now generally accepted that there were doubtless a series of migrations, although the now-discredited view that an Indo-Aryan invasion took place was once seriously entertained. The date of entry of the Indo-Aryans into the Indian subcontinent cannot be determined precisely, though the beginning of the 2nd millennium bce is plausible and generally accepted.

There is controversy concerning the precise position of the language of the Indo-Iranian family first attested in Middle Eastern texts of about 1450–1350 bce. Some borrowed words and proper names appearing in these Hittite-Hurrian documents have been interpreted variously as belonging to Indo-Iranian, to an Indic subgroup of Indo-Iranian that had not yet fully split, or to Indo-Aryan proper. For example, the number word aika- ‘one’ has been considered to indicate that the language in question was Indo-Aryan, since the Iranian term is aiva- (Avestan aēuua-/aēuuā-) in contrast to Sanskrit eka-, although the Sanskrit particle eva ‘only, indeed,’ comparable to Avestan aēuua-/aēuuā- ‘indeed,’ can be considered to reflect the existence in earliest Indo-Aryan of both eka- and eva- for ‘one.’ Consensus has yet to be reached on this issue, although a majority of authorities hold that the language in question represents an early variety of Old Indo-Aryan, prior to changes such as the replacement of *źh by h (e.g., *źh > jh > h).

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Also awaiting further research is the identification of the Harappan peoples of the Indus Valley and other sites in the subcontinent, whose writing has not yet been satisfactorily deciphered despite decades of effort. A definitive solution to this problem could possibly answer the question of whether Indo-Aryans encountered these people or whether Harappan civilization had passed by the time the Indo-Aryans arrived on the subcontinent, although scholars now generally agree that the Indus Valley civilization’s decline was not due to any Indo-Aryan invasion. Whatever may be the answers to the questions concerning the Middle Eastern texts and the Harappan peoples, the reasons for the split of the Indo-Aryans and Iranians are not known.

The above scenario assumes that the Indo-Aryans migrated into the Indian subcontinent. This is not, however, universally accepted. There are scholars, both Indian and non-Indian, who maintain that the Indo-Aryans originated in the subcontinent, whence they emigrated. Indeed, it has been argued that the earliest Indo-Aryan as represented in Vedic texts is tantamount to Proto-Indo-European. The issue is complex, and evidence that could be absolutely probative is largely lacking—there is no archaeological evidence that definitively establishes a migration of Indo-Aryans into the subcontinent, but there is equally no definitive archaeological evidence of Iranians and other Indo-European groups having emigrated from the subcontinent. Moreover, the textual evidence from Sanskrit sources that some have claimed demonstrates that Indo-Aryans retained memories of an earlier homeland from which they migrated into the Indian subcontinent is small and subject to serious doubt, as it serves to support this thesis only with considerable interpretational effort.

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The linguistic evidence, on the other hand, is best reconciled with the thesis that the Indo-Aryans did indeed go to the subcontinent from an external homeland and that the early Vedic system is not equivalent to that of Proto-Indo-European. It is methodologically less plausible, for example, to assume that the Vedic vowel system, which contains a, ā, i, ī, u, ū, but no short e or o, is the system ancestral to that of Indo-European languages such as Greek and Latin, which do have short e and o. One would have to assume not only that a of the ancestral proto-language split into e and o under conditions difficult to specify but also that differences between different kinds of a vowels in Indo-Iranian account for the alternations between velars and palatals in these languages. It is methodologically simpler to assume that the late Proto-Indo-European system had vowels e, ē, o, ō, a, ā, and that these vowels merged in Indo-Iranian.