Indo-Iranian languages


The Indo-Iranian languages, or Aryan languages constitute the largest and southeasternmost extant branch of the Indo-European language family. They have more than 1.5 billion speakers, stretching from Europe, Turkey and the Caucasus eastward to Xinjiang and Assam, and south to Sri Lanka and the Maldives. Furthermore, there are large communities of Indo-Iranian speakers in northwestern Europe, North America, and Australia.
The common ancestor of all of the languages in this family is called Proto-Indo-Iranian—also known as Common Aryan—which was spoken in approximately the late 3rd millennium BC. The three branches of the modern 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.

Languages

The Indo-Iranian languages consist of three groups:
Indo-Iranian languages are spoken by more than 1.5 billion people. The languages with the most speakers are a part of the Indo-Aryan group: Hindi–Urdu including region based populated dialects Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Maithili, Marwari, Rajasthani, Chhattisgarhi ], Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Odia, Sindhi, Assamese, Sinhala, Nepali, Bishnupuriya and Rangpuri. Among the Iranian branch, major languages are Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, and Balochi. There are also many smaller languages.

History

The common proto-language of the Indo-Iranian languages is Proto-Indo-Iranian language, which has been reconstructed.
The oldest attested Indo-Iranian languages are Vedic Sanskrit, Older and Younger Avestan and Old Persian. A few words from another Indo-Aryan language are attested in documents from the ancient Mitanni and Hittite kingdoms in the Near East.
Within the Indo-European family, Indo-Iranian belongs to the Satem group. Various proposals have been made that link the Indo-Iranian languages with other subgroups of Indo-European, but these remain without wider acceptance.

Features

Innovations shared with other languages affected by the satem sound changes include:
Innovations shared with Greek include:
Innovations unique to Indo-Iranian include: