Talk:Indo-Aryan languages

Kannada should not be included in Indo-Aryan

In the Language Comparison chart of this article, Kannada language should not be included as it's very obvious it's not the part of Indo-Aryan or Indo-European sect but rather it belongs to the Dravidian family group.

Mitanni

It seems strange that Mitanni language would be Indo-European if its speakers are hurrian?

no, the Mitanni nobility were indo-aryan, ruling over a hurrian population. there was some confusion as to which language should be labeled "mitanni", but the term generally refers to the upper-class indo-aryan language now. see Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni dab (ᛏ) 07:24, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Classification

The Ethnologue classification, which we repeat here, seems a bit idiosyncratic - making Eastern Punjabi closer to Hindi than to western Punjabi, standard Hindi and the western Hindi dialects closer to Gujarati than to the eastern Hindi dialects; the Bihari dialects closer to Bengali than to Eastern Hindi...Britannica, as copied on this page, gives what appears to me to be a more standard classification of the Indo-Aryan languages. Should we perhaps report both? as alternatives? k 21:17, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

I think perhaps another classification should be used. Also, Nuristani and Dardic as Indo-Aryan? There is not a consensus on Dardic, but I have seen Nuristani as an independent branch of Indo-Iranian. Perhaps some of us can come up with a better classification and to clean up the article a bit. Imperial78

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The term Aryan needs some mention. The link to Aryan gives this text: The word Aryan was originally used in various Indo-Iranian languages with a meaning roughly similar to "noble" or "honorable", and was sometimes used by the speakers of these languages to refer to themselves. but it should be part of this page rather than relying on a link to a different topic which has a sub-note explaining what, to it, is a different topic - if that makes sense.

Classification

We desperately need a good classification system for these languages. At the moment, we use a mixture of the Ethnologue system (unsatisfactory) with some excentric additions. I just came across West and Southwest Indo-Aryan languages, and it doesn't seem to make much sense of anything. You might be interested in Linguasphere's statistical classification, which can be seen in PDF here. — Gareth Hughes 13:46, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

It doesn't make any sense at all. The classification is "Western" and "Southern" Indo-Aryan. I am starting the articles Southern Indo-Aryan languages and Western Indo-Aryan languages and I will redirect as much as I can. However West and Southwest Indo-Aryan languages needs to be deleted. Krankman 10:08, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Seeking help and contribution

Dear Wikipedians,

We apreciate your valuable contribution in article named Wikipedia:Indic transliteration scheme on english WIkipedia.

We at Marathi Language wikipedia do not have enough expertise to update IPA related info in our article, specialy we have been unable to import/update IPA templates and do not know how to use IPA symbols.Please click here-this link- to provide help to update "IPA transliteration for Indic Languages" article for Marathi wikipedia

We seek and request for help in updating above mentioned article and would like to know relevant resources and refferences in respect of Devanagari and IPA .

Thanks and Regards

Mahitgar 16:08, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Merge with List

I agree, it should be merged - the list should be the main thing, and here there should only be a link to the list. This is the way it's done in a lot of other language articles. --Cbdorsett 09:12, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I'm lost; to what are you referring and to whom are you replying? --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 11:43, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Pulling in stuff from German article

The German de:Indoarische Sprachen just got a major overhaul, won the 4th prize in the semi-annual writing competetioon there and is on the way to featured. So perhaps someone here may be interested to pull some some content from that article. (Being not a native speaker of English I myself prefer doing translations to, not from German). --Pjacobi 19:54, 22 April 2007 (UTC) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Chronology of attestation

Vedic Sanskrit is an earlier linguistic stage than Prakrits, but as far as concrete physical attestation, the Prakrits are actually attested first (in the Asoka inscriptions, which should probably be mentioned in this article). AnonMoos (talk) 15:18, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Map

Is there really a need to show the same map twice on the same page? --Maurice45 (talk) 13:01, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

The first map says that Urdu is only a lingua franca with no prevalence as first language. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Urdu has millions of first language speakers in India and Pakistan.

Burrowed Words=

I think the article speaks to much of Indians, and there is very little evidence supporting their claims. The Indian sanskirt language has many burrowed words from the ancestor PIE language, making it not the home of the "Aryans" or PIE's This is associated with the steppe theory. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.80.105.24 (talk) 06:41, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

kurds are aryan race

we kurds are aryan race and we are not : iranian or turk or arab —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.224.178.177 (talk) 07:13, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

There is no such thing as aryan race. Read up on Race (classification of humans) to see what the scientific community thinks about layman use of the term. Chartinael (talk) 11:24, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Dialect continuum

The text in the Dialect Continuum section was copied from the Dialect Continuum article. I changed text where I thought appropriate. But the author seems to discuss only the dialect continuum of the Hindi dialects, and doesn't touch upon the other Indic. The author of that section mentions some other languages, and points out that out of these, Punjabi may be most reasonably included in this continuum.

Of course, the author(s) who contributed that section isn't necessarily correct. But I took the information from that article, and changed some text to better clarify the information based on that interpretation.89.187.142.72 (talk) 07:17, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, that needs some work. Hindi isn't a dialect continuum, it's only part of one. The criterion is whether people consider their language to be Hindi, not whether it's mutually intelligible or has intermediate varieties. — kwami (talk) 07:46, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Nepali certainly borrows a lot of words from Hindi. Whether you can find a Hindi word in a Nepali dictionary or not, it's usually readily understood by nominal Nepali speakers. Nevertheless Nepali uses different pronouns and different verb conjugationss. That could be a pretty good indicator of which language you are actually speaking at a particular moment! Based on conjugations perhaps there isn't a true dialect continuum, although you could also argue for a continuum if you ignore that and only look at word stems. LADave (talk) 13:00, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

A dialect continuum is really continuous only at the level of (usually) traditional rural dialects, where neighbouring settlements (villages, for example) use varieties which are almost imperceptibly different from each other, not on the level of standardised national languages, which are based on points in the continuum which are usually too widely spaced out to be nearly as similar. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:20, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

"Indo-Aryan" and related Categories defined Incorrectly

First, I am not sure where the Categorization and Definition of Indo-Aryan came from, but the concept in its current form does not appear to exist outside of what has been created here on Wikipedia. Can we have more non-wikipedia sources on this term? My understanding is that the earliest written evidence of a anyone refering to themself as 'Aryan' in ethnicity is from the Behistun Inscription of Darius the Great who was a Persian. Whereas here, we have now changed the concept to distinctly "Indian". This entire content on Wikipedia, as well as the related articles, sounds like POV to me and needs revisiting and edited with actual non-wikipedia-derived sources. PenningtonClassical (talk) 00:00, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

I agree. I thought it was pretty much universally acknowledged that there is no such thing as Aryan. I'm thoroughly confused after reading this page. would someone care to explain to me how it became OK to use this word to denote any particular people,language or w/e? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.227.222.145 (talk) 17:57, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

What is Aryan?? It's not a race, has been proven. What is Indo-Aryan?? — Preceding unsigned comment added by AshaPradeep (talk • contribs) 18:20, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

I too wish to know about this discrepancy.Aryan is a word mired in racism and outside of Sanskrutam meanings of noble has no physical definition attached to it. So why is it being used as a definition for a peoples/language? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.147.224.225 (talk) 20:20, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Personally I prefer "Indic". I believe the problem is that Dravidian speakers (and maybe Munda or other) object that "Indic" implies "Indian", which could mean all of them. "Aryan" means Indic + Iranian. (As in the "Aryan invasion" of India.) "Indo-Arian" therefore means the cross-section of Indian × Aryan -- that is, "Indic" sensu stricto. All of this will be explained in any basic volume on Indic or even Indo-European languages. — kwami (talk) 07:37, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Number of speakers

In its current form, the introduction says there are 1.5 billion speakers. It also later says there are more than 900 million native speakers. This last number might mean the sum of the speakers of the specific languages listed, but I did the math and got 800 million. If it means native speakers of all languages, why the discrepancy with 1.5 billion? Maybe 900 million are native speakers, where as 1.5 billion includes non-native speakers? I don't know the answers to all these questions, but it'd be good if someone who does edits this. 188.169.229.30 (talk) 10:19, 18 March 2013 (UTC)