Indo-Iranian languages

The Indo-Iranian languages 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.

I was not a little surprised to find that out of ten words in Du Perron’s Zind Dictionary, six or seven were pure Sanskrit. ~ William Jones

Quotes

• I was not a little surprised to find that out of ten words in Du Perron’s Zind Dictionary, six or seven were pure Sanskrit.
  • Sir William Jones’ works, Vol. I, pp. 82 and 83, quoted in [1], 157ff

• It remains quite clear, however, that Indic and Iranian developed from different Indo-European dialects, whose period of common development was not long enough to effect total fusion.
  • The Indo-European Dialects by Antoine Meillet (translated by Samuel N. Rosenberg), Alabama Linguistic and Philological Series No. 15, University of Alabama Press, 1967 (original book 1908, second edition 1922). Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

• The Iranian family, which was next to sweep across the steppe and deserts, finds its region of greatest diversity in the central Asian mountains, and its ancestral Indo-Iranian family finds its own greatest diversity in the mountain region from central Asia to northern India (i.e. Bactria- Sogdiana and parts just south).
  • Johanna Nichols NICHOLS 1997: The Epicentre of the Indo-European Linguistic Spread. Nichols, Johanna. Chapter 8, in ―Archaeology and Language, Vol. I: Theoretical and Methodological Orientations, ed. Roger Blench & Matthew Spriggs, Routledge, London and New York, 1997.

• Prior to the Turkic expansion, at the beginning of the Iron Age, Iranian spread from somewhere in the vicinity of Bactria, Sogdiana, and the eastern steppe to cover most or all of western central Asia and the entire steppe, much of the Near East at least to eastern Anatolia, and, at least intermittently, the Danube plain, where Slavic vocabulary and ethnonyms attest to a major Iranianization at about the fifth century AD, and where there is good archaeological evidence of a Scythian presence in the mid-first millennium BC...
  • Johanna Nichols. 1998. The Eurasian spread zone and the Indo-European dispersal. in : Blench, R., & Spriggs, M. (2012). Archaeology and Language II: Archaeological Data and Linguistic Hypotheses. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.

• It is still a hazardous task to connect the archaeological evidence… in the Central Asian steppe with the appearance of Iranian (Aryan) and Indic (Indo-Aryan) tribes in Iran, Afghanistan and India”.... [Indo-Iranian is archaeologically an] Indo-European branch which all the homeland theories we have reviewed so far have failed to explain.
  • Shan M.M. Winn. Heaven, Heroes and Happiness: The Indo-European Roots of Western Ideology by Shan M.M. Winn, University Press of America, Lanham-New York-London, 1995. Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.