One language branch links Romani in Europe to Sinhala in Sri Lanka
More than 300 languages, spoken by around 1.7 billion people, descend from a single ancestor called Proto-Indo-Iranian. Their range is astonishing: Romani in Europe, Ossetian in the Caucasus, Kurdish in Mesopotamia, Sinhala in Sri Lanka and Maldivian in the Indian Ocean, with offshoots as far away as Fiji and the Caribbean.
The Indo-Iranian languages form the largest branch of the Indo-European family. They split into three groups: Indo-Aryan, spoken across the Indian subcontinent; Iranian, centred on the Iranian plateau; and the small Nuristani group. One language, Badeshi, still resists classification. The biggest single member is Hindustani, which covers both Hindi and Urdu. Beyond the heartlands, Domari reaches the Levant and North Africa, Sarikoli is spoken in Xinjiang, and diaspora communities carry these tongues to Europe, North America, East and South Africa, and the Gulf.
An older label for the family is the Aryan languages. Ancient Indo-Iranians seem to have called themselves by a reconstructed word, Áryas, which survives in place names such as Aryavarta, the Sanskrit land of the Aryans, the Avestan Airyanem Vaejah, and even Iran itself. Because of the associations of later Aryanism, scholars now generally avoid the term.
Where did the speakers come from? The usual answer points to the Sintashta culture of the Eurasian steppe, seen as an eastward movement of people descended from the Corded Ware culture, which in turn may reflect earlier migrations of Yamnaya-related groups carrying Proto-Indo-European. The genetic links among these three cultures are still unclear. Sintashta graves contain the oldest known chariots, making the culture a strong candidate for inventing a technology that later transformed warfare across the Old World. Its successor, the Andronovo culture, is widely accepted as Indo-Iranian, a dialect continuum that later divided into Iranian and Indo-Aryan.
Getting from the steppe to Iran and India is the hard part. The archaeologist Hiebert favours an expansion of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex as the best trace of their arrival, though the steppe's distinctive timber graves are missing further south. J. P. Mallory concedes the difficulty and proposes his Kulturkugel, or culture bullet, model: migrants adopted local cultural habits while keeping their own language and religion.
Source: Indo-Iranian languages
