Indo-Aryan languages

The Indo-Aryan languages or Indics are a subgroup of languages, belonging to the Indo-Iranian group of Indo-European languages. They are spoken in the countries of the Indian subcontinent.

Historical, social and cultural aspects

Geographic distribution

In the second millennium B.C. C. Indo-Aryan was spoken in the center and north of the Indian subcontinent, especially in the Indus and Ganges basins, but also by the elite of the Mitanni State (now northern Syria and Iraq). Historically, the Indian subcontinent was the main region of development of this group of languages. However, culturally those languages were influential throughout South Asia.

Around the first millennium AD. C. Sanskrit was also used for private purposes in Southeast Asia and western Indonesia, where it remained important until the region's Islamization. In fact, the languages of Southeast Asia developed writing systems inspired by the Sanskrit system and took numerous cultisms and lexical borrowings from Sanskrit. The spread of Buddhism in Central Asia and the Far East also brought the influx of Sanskrit to those regions. For example, the typical order of the Japanese kanas is clearly inspired by the order of the Devanagari alphabet of Sanskrit.

Ancient Indo-Aryan

The first evidence of Indo-Aryan corresponds to Vedic Sanskrit, the language used in the oldest texts preserved in the Indian subcontinent, which constitute the founding canon of Hinduism, known as the Rig-veda. Outside of India there also seem to have been Indo-Aryan peoples, such as the ruling class of the Mitani Empire which flourished around the same period that the Rig-veda was composed (there has been some debate as to how Indo-Aryan-speaking people they reached Mitani).

Middle Indo-Aryan

Around the VI century a. C., Vedic Sanskrit was codified and standardized by the Indian grammarian Pāṇini, and the language from that codification is known as Classical Sanskrit. Middle Indo-Aryan is primarily represented by the Prakrits that gave rise to the modern Indo-Aryan languages.

Modern Indo-Aryan

Modern Indo-Aryan is the most numerous branch of Indo-European languages after Romance. Demographically the main current Indo-Aryan language is Hindustani (or Hindi-Urdu). Other demographically very important Indo-Aryan languages are Bengali and Punjabi. In addition, there are more than a dozen Indo-Aryan languages with more than a million speakers.

Classification

The Indo-Aryan languages are clearly related to the Iranian languages of the Middle East. In fact, they share a good number of linguistic innovations that show that together they form a phylogenetic group within the Indo-European language family. In fact, the detailed study of Sanskrit between the 18th and 19th centuries gave rise to comparative linguistics whose evolution gave rise to the scientific study of modern linguistics. The written records of the Indo-Aryan languages extend over almost four millennia, so the languages belonging to the Indo-Aryan subgroup are classified into three periods:

• Old Town (Vedic, Sanskrit), from the beginnings (1500 BC) to approximately 500 BC. C.
• Average (pacritus, apabhra),śa), from 500 a. C. to 1000 d.C.
• Modern interiorfrom 1000 AD to the present.

Internal sorting

The internal classification of the languages of a language family or subfamily is a more complicated matter than the identification of kinship. The first scientific attempt at a phylogenetic classification of the Indo-Aryan languages on the basis of shared isoglosses is due to Hoernle (1880), who identified four of the currently accepted first-level groups that coincide with the Northern, Western, Eastern and southern. He further postulated relationships between these four groups, but subsequent work has not confirmed them. Grierson (1907, 1931) proposed modifications and largely accepted Hoernle's work, one contribution of this author is to recognize the Dardic languages as an independent phylogenetic group. Other later classifications proposed different phylogenetic trees, although they generally coincided in the first level groups: Chatterji (1926), Turner (1966, 1975), Katre (1968), Nigam (1972) and Carmona (1974).

Indoor languages: Northern North-central Central Eastern Southern Indoor Insular

Dispensing with the relationships in the phylogenetic tree which remain a contentious problem, the almost universally accepted first-level phylogenetic groups are the Dardic group, the Northwestern group, the Pahari group, the Central group, the Eastern or Maghadi group, the southern and the insular group (although various authors use slightly different names for these groups and differ in the ascription of a few languages to these groups). The precise relationships between these groups is not clear, but several authors propose classifications similar to the following:

• Northern formed by:
  • The Dry languages, which for most authors along with the North-West languages form a valid phylogenetic unit, the most important languages of this group are cachemiro, shina and khowar.
  • Northwest or Western Indoary, which encompasses the Western Panjabi (lahnda), the Syndhi.
• Central
  • Indoario norcentral, which encompasses Nepalese and Dogri, among other languages, which some place within the central indoario.
  • Indoario centroccidental, which includes dialectal blocks such as Rajastani, Guyaratí and bhili.
  • Central Indoary, which encompasses the Hindi-urdu and other dialectal varieties associated with the Hindi.
• Eastern, which encompasses the Bikhani-Mahili dialectal groups, Bengali, Asamese and Oriya.
• Southern and Island Instituteincluding a continental and other island group:
  • Maratí-konkaní, which includes maratí and konkaní.
  • Indoario insular, currently represented by Sri Lankan cingalés (Ceilán) and diverjí (Maldives).

Outside these groups is Romani, which, like the Dardic languages, seems to share some archaisms lost in the other groups.

On a not strictly phylogenetic basis, the ASJP project based on lexical similarity proposes the following relationships:

Family languages

Ancient languages:

• Sanskrit language

Main modern languages:

Language	Speakers	Region	Country
Hindí-urdu (indostanic)	490 million (2006)		India PakistanPakistan Afghanistan
Bengali	230 million.	West Bengal ___	India Bangladés
Panyabi	88 million (2005)		PakistanPakistan India
Rayastaní	80 million.	Raystan	India
Marati	68.1 million.	Maharastra	India
Guyaratí	46.5 million.	Guyarat	India
Oriya	31.7 million.	Orissa	India
Sindhi	21.4 million.	Sindh	PakistanPakistan
Asamés	16.8 million.	Assam	India Bangladés Bhutan
Cingalés	15.6 million.	___	Sri Lanka
Nepali	13.9 million.	___	Nepal
Bhili	6.0 million.	Raystan	India
Cachemiro	4 million.	Jammu and Kashmir Kashmir Azad	India PakistanPakistan
Roma	2.5-4 million.	___	Europe
Maldivivo	0.37 million. (2007)	___	Maldives

Linguistic description

The Indo-Aryan languages retain a good number of archaisms from Proto-Indo-European, such as grammatical gender, case, synthetic passive voice, etc. Although some of the languages have lost a great deal of older Indo-European features, and some have developed features apparently foreign to Late Indo-European such as the appearance of ergative constructions and even the development of tones.

Phonology

The phonological system has the peculiarity of distinguishing between four types of plosives: simple voiceless, simple voiced, aspirated voiceless and aspirated voiced. They also have retroflex or cacuminal consonants. Retroflexes are usually transcribed as < ṭ, ḍ, ṭh, ḍh, ṇ, ṣ > (the dot in transcriptions < ṛ, ḷ > generally refers to their being fluid syllabic, not necessarily retroflex).

Another outstanding feature is the existence of an opposition between aspirated and unaspirated stops. Even the appearance in many Indo-Aryan languages of "voiced aspirates".

Grammar

Indo-Aryan languages have SOV basic syntactic order and have postpositions. These languages retain part of the nominal inflection of Old Sanskrit, although in smaller numbers: Hindi-Urdu distinguishes three cases (directive, oblique and vocative) and Bengali distinguishes four cases (nominative or directive, objective or oblique, genitive, locative- instrumental).

Lexical comparison

The following shows a list of cognates in different Indo-Aryan languages:

GLOSA	Sanskrit	Roma	Northern			Central			East			South
			Cachemir	Sindhi	Panyabi	Guyarati	Hindi	Nepali	Asamés	Bengali	Oriya	Marathi	Cingalés
'quire'	P-CCH-	phuč-	pru-h-	puch-	pucch-	pūch-	puch-	puch-	pus-	puch-	puch-	pus-	aha fuh-a
'Come'	AP(AYA)- Add-	av-	Yu-	ac-	āu-	āv-	ā-	āu-	āh-	ā-	ās-	yē-	ē-
'die'	MÁR-b MRI(YÁ)-	mer-	sea-	sea-	sea-	sea-	sea-	sea-	sea-	sea-	sea-	sea-	mär-/mi-
'doing'	KAR-	ker-	kar-	kar-	kar-	kar-	kar-	Gar-	k-r-	k-r-	k-r-	kar-	kara-
'beber'	PÍB-	pi-	co-	pi-	pī-	pī-	pī-	piu-	pi-	pi-	pi-	pi-	bī-
'comer'	KHAMAD-	xa-	khyo-	khā-	khā-	khā-	khā-	khā-	khā-	khā-	khā-	khā-	ka-
'dar'	D.	de-	dyu-	rogai	de-	āp-/de-	de-	di-	di-	dē-	dē-	dē-	de-
'ir'	And...	-a-	yu-/ga-h-	vān-	jā-	jā-	jā-	jā-	zā-	jā-	j-	-ā-	Now...
'hear'	ŚRU- Ś-N-	Sun-	buz-	Sunna...	Sunna...	sābha--	Sun-	Sun-	xun-	šon-	Sunna...	aik-	ähe-
'ver'	D-K mud-	dikh-	(sighs)	rogais	vēkh-	dēkh-	dēkh-	dēkh-	dēkh-	dækh-	dēkh-	dēkh-	daki-

^aMaldivide shape.

^bWay of the Vedic.

The reconstructed numerals for different putative Indo-Aryan groups are:

GLOSA	Northern		Central			ORIENTAL PROTO-IA	Southern Insular		Sanskrit	PROTO- CONTENTS
	PROTO-DÁRDICO	PROTO-IA NOR.OCC.	PROTO-ROMAN	PROTO-IA CEN.OCC.	PROTO-IA CEN.OR.		PROTO-IA	PROTO-IA INSULAR
'1'	♪	*eka	*yek	♪	♪	♪	*eka	*eka	EKAḤ	*eka-
'2'	*du	♪	*dui	*d *γini	♪ *duī	*dui	♪don-	*deka	DVAU	*dvau/ *duī
'3'	♪	*træ	♪trin	*trini	*tīn	*tini	♪	♪	TRYAḤ	♪trya-
'4'	♪ Cawr	*cār	♪	*cyār	*cār	*cāri	♪	♪ Hatara	CATVāRAḤ	*ćatvar-
'5'	♪ panc	♪ panc	*panč	♪ panc	*pāc	♪ panc	♪ panc	♪ Paha	PAÑCA	*panća
'6'	♪	♪	*šov	♪	♪	♪	♪ sah-	♪ There's a-	gnashing	♪ *ćhaw-
'7'	*sāt-	*Sat		*sāt	*sāt	*sāt	*Sat	♪ hat	SAPTA	♪ sapta
'8'	♪ a blister ♪	♪ aṭ		*āṭh	*āṭh	♪	♪	♪ a blister	A tie	♪ a blister
'9'	♪	♪nav-		♪	♪	♪	♪nav-	♪ Navaya	NAVA	♪ baby ♪
'10'	♪	♪	*deš	♪	♪ d	♪	*daha/das	♪dahaya	DAŚA	*daśa