Iranian Languages - Term

Term

See also: Indo-Iranian languages

The term Iranian language is applied to any language which is descended from the Proto-Iranian parent language. While unattested, Proto-Iranian was first spoken by presumably people/tribes in Central Asia sometime in the late 3rd to early 2nd millennium BCE. The area in which Iranian languages, i.e. descendants of Proto-Iranian, have been spoken stretches from western China to eastern Europe. Proto-Iranian was related to, also unattested, Proto-Indo-Aryan. Proto-Indo-Aryan gave birth to the various northern Indian languages over time. Taken together all Iranian, Indo-Aryan, and Nuristani languages form the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family.

The term Iranian was introduced in 1836 by Christian Lassen, followed by Wilhelm Geiger and his Grundriss der Iranischen Philologie (1895) whereas Friedrich von Spiegel in 1859 preferred the term Eranian. Robert Needham Cust, however, used the term Irano-Aryan as early as 1878. Orientalists such as George Abraham Grierson and Max Müller also differentiated between Irano-Aryan and Indo-Aryan. Grierson also uses the term Eranian. Some recent scholarship - primarily in German - has revived of the term Irano-Aryan in analogy to Indo-Aryan. The linguist Ahmad Hasan Dani uses the term and asserts Iranian is short for Irano-Aryan. The linguist Gilbert Lazard, specialist for Persian, has been using the term consequently in his publications, whereas Mohammad Djafar suggests to establish Aryan for the branch. Still, Iranian remains the standard term used by the vast majority of English-language linguists.

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