The Indo-Iranian languages (also known as Indo-Iranic languages[1][2] or collectively the Aryan languages[3]) constitute the largest and southeasternmost extant branch of the
Indo-European language family. They include over 300 languages, spoken by around 1.5 billion speakers, predominantly in
South Asia,
West Asia and parts of
Central Asia.
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.[4] 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.[5]
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.
^Gvozdanović, Jadranka (1999).
Numeral Types and Changes Worldwide. Walter de Gruyter. p. 221.
ISBN978-3-11-016113-7. The usage of 'Aryan languages' is not to be equated with Indo-Aryan languages, rather Indo-Iranic languages of which Indo-Aryan is a subgrouping.
^Anthony, David W. (2007). The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton University Press.
ISBN978-0-691-05887-0.
^Bashir, Elena (2007). "Dardic". In Jain, Danesh; Cardona, George (eds.). The Indo-Aryan languages. Routledge. p. 905.
ISBN978-0-415-77294-5. 'Dardic' is a geographic cover term for those Northwest Indo-Aryan languages which [...] developed new characteristics different from the IA languages of the Indo-Gangetic plain. Although the Dardic and Nuristani (previously 'Kafiri') languages were formerly grouped together, Morgenstierne (1965) has established that the Dardic languages are Indo-Aryan, and that the Nuristani languages constitute a separate subgroup of Indo-Iranian.
^"Hindi" L1: 322 million (2011 Indian census), including perhaps 150 million speakers of other languages that reported their language as "Hindi" on the census. L2: 274 million (2016, source unknown). Urdu L1: 67 million (2011 & 2017 censuses), L2: 102 million (1999 Pakistan, source unknown, and 2001 Indian census): Ethnologue 21.
Hindi at Ethnologue (21st ed., 2018) .
Urdu at Ethnologue (21st ed., 2018) .
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.
S2CID135347276.
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.
ISBN978-3-85124-751-0.
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.
ISBN978-1-108-75866-6.