INDO-ARYAN LANGUAGES. “Indo-Aryan” is the name generally adopted for those Aryans who entered India and settled there in prehistoric times, and for their descendants. It distinguishes them from the other Aryans who settled in Persia and elsewhere, just as the name “Aryo-Indian” signifies those inhabitants of India who are Aryans, as distinguished from other Indian races, Dravidians, Mundas and so on. A synonym of “Aryo-Indian” is “Gaudian” or “Gaurian,” based on a Sanskrit word for the non-Dravidian parts of India proper. These two words refer to the people from the point of view of India, while “Indo-Aryan” looks at them from the wider aspect of Indo-European ethnology and philology. The general history of the Aryan languages is treated in the articles [Indo-European Languages] and [Aryan]. Here we propose to offer a brief review of the special course of their development in India.
Most of the Indo-Aryans branched off from the common Aryan stock in the highlands of Khokand and Badakshan, and marched south into what is now eastern Afghanistan. Here some of them settled, while others entered the Punjab by the valley of the river Kabul. This last migration was a gradual process extending over several centuries, and at different epochs different tribes came in, speaking different dialects of the common language. The literary records of the latest times of this invasion show us one Indo-Aryan tribe complaining of the unintelligible speech of another, and even denying to it the right of common Aryan-hood.
The Piśāca Languages.—Before proceeding farther, it is advisable to discuss the fate of another small group of languages spoken in the extreme north-west of India. After the great fission which separated the main body of the Indo-Aryans from the Iranians, but before all the special phonetic characteristics of Iranian speech had developed, another horde of invaders crossed the Hindū Kush from the Pāmirs, journeying directly south. They occupied the submontane tract, including the country round Chitral and Gilgit, Kashmir and Kafiristan. Some even followed the course of the Indus as far as Sind, and formed colonies there and in the western Punjab. Here they mingled with the Indo-Aryans who had come down the Kabul valley, and to a certain extent infected the local dialect with their idioms. How far their influence extended over the rest of India is undecided, and will probably never be known, but traces of it have been detected by some inquirers even in the dialects of modern Marathi. Those who remained behind in the hill country, the whole of which is popularly known as Dardistan, were isolated by the inhospitable nature of their home and by their own savage character. They seem to have had customs allied to cannibalism, and in later Indian literature legends grew around them as a race of demons called Piśācas, ὠμοφάγοι, who spoke a barbaric tongue called Paiśācī. This language appears now and then in the Sanskrit drama, and Sanskrit philologists wrote still-extant grammatical notices of its peculiarities. These show that it possessed an extremely archaic character, and the same fact is prominent in the Piśāca languages of the present day. Some words which were spoken in the oldest time are preserved with hardly a change of letter, while in India proper the corresponding forms have either disappeared altogether or have been so changed as to be hardly recognizable at first sight. The principal modern Piśāca languages are three or four spoken in Kafiristan, Khōwar of Chitral, Shīnā of Gilgit, Kāshmīrī, and Kōhistānī. The last two are border tongues, much mixed with the neighbouring languages of India proper. The only one which has any literature is Kashmiri (q.v.). The rest are entirely uncultivated. Their general character may be described as partly Indian and partly Iranian, although they have in their isolated position developed some phonetic laws of their own.
Indo-Aryan Classification.—The oldest specimens of Indo-Aryan speech which we possess very closely resemble the oldest Iranian (see [Persia]: Language). There are passages in the Iranian Avesta which can be turned into good Vedic Sanskrit by the application of a few simple phonetic laws. It is sufficient for our present purposes to note that after the separation the development of the two old forms of speech went on independently and followed somewhat different lines. This is most marked in the treatment of a nexus of two consonants. While modern Iranian often retains the nexus with little or no alteration, modern Indo-Aryan prefers to simplify it. For instance, while the old Aryan sth becomes sit or ist in modern Persian, it becomes tth or th in modern Indo-Aryan. Similarly bhr becomes bir in the former, but bbh or bh in the latter. Thus:—
| Old Indo-Aryan. | Old Iranian. | Modern Persian. | Hindī. |
| sthāna- | stāna- | sitān or istān | thānā, a place. |
| bhrātar- | brātar- | birādar | bhāī, a brother. |
The earliest extant literary record of Indo-Aryan languages is the collection of hymns known as the Rig-Veda. As we have it now, we may take it as representing, on the whole, the particular vernacular dialect spoken in the east of the Punjab and in the upper portion of the Gangetic Doab where it was compiled. The tribe which spoke this dialect spread east and south, and their habitat, as so extended, between the Punjab and the modern Allahabad and reaching from the Himalaya to the Vindhya Hills in the south, became known to Sanskrit geographers as the Madhyadēśa or “Midland,” also called Āryāvarta, or the “home of the Aryans.” The language spoken here received constant literary culture, and a refined form of its archaic dialect became fixed by the labours of grammarians about the year 300 B.C., receiving the name of Saṃskŗta (Sanskrit) or “purified,” in contradistinction to the folk-speech of the same tract and to the many Indo-Aryan dialects of other parts of India, all of which were grouped together under the title of Prākŗta (Prakrit) or “natural,” “unpurified.” Sanskrit (q.v.) became the language of religion and polite literature, and thus the Midland, the native land of its mother dialect, became accepted as the true pure home of the Indo-Aryan people, the rest being, from the point of view of educated India, more or less barbarous. In later times, the great lingua franca of India, Hindostani, also took its origin in this tract.
Round the Midland, on three sides—west, south and east—lay a country inhabited, even in Vedic times, by other Indo-Aryan tribes. This tract included the modern Punjab, Sind, Gujarat, Rajputana with the country to its east, Oudh and Behar. Rajputana belongs geographically to the Midland, but it was a late conquest, and for our present purposes may be considered as belonging to the Outer Band. The various Indo-Aryan dialects spoken over this band were all more closely related to each other than was any of them to the language of the Midland. In fact, at an early period of the linguistic history of India there must have been two sets of Indo-Aryan dialects,—one the language of the Midland and the other that of the Outer Band.[1] Hoernle was the first to suggest that the dialects of the Outer Band represent on the whole the language of the earlier Indo-Aryan immigrants, while the language of the Midland was that of the latest comers, who entered the Punjab like a wedge and thrust the others outwards in three directions.
As time went on, the population of the Midland expanded and forced the Outer Band into a still wider circuit. The Midland conquered the eastern Punjab, Rajputana with Gujarat (where it reached the sea) and Oudh. With its armies and its settlers it carried its language, and hence in all these territories we now find mixed forms of speech. The basis of each is that of the Outer Band, but the body is that of the Midland. Moreover, as we leave the Midland and approach the external borders of this tract, the influence of the Midland language grows weaker and weaker, and traces of the original Outer language become more and more prominent. In the same way the languages of the Outer Band were forced farther and farther afield. There was no room for expansion to the west, but to the south it flowed over the Maratha country, and to the east into Orissa, into Bengal and, last of all, into Assam.
The state of affairs at the present day is therefore as follows: There is a Midland Indo-Aryan language (Western Hindi) occupying the Gangetic Doab and the country immediately to its north and south. Round it, on three sides, is a band of mixed languages, Panjabi (of the central Punjab), Gujarati, Rajasthani (of Rajputana and its neighbourhood), and Eastern Hindi (of Oudh and the country to its south). Beyond these again, there is the band of Outer Languages (Kashmiri, with its Pisaca basis), Lahnda (of the western Punjab), Sindhi (here the band is broken by Gujarati), Marathi, Oriya (of Orissa), Bihari, Bengali and Assamese. There are also, at the present day, Indo-Aryan languages in the Himalaya, north of the Midland. These belong to the Intermediate Band, being recent importations from Rajputana. The Midland language is therefore now enclosed within a ring fence of Intermediate forms of speech.
We have seen that the word “Prakrit” means “natural” or “vernacular,” as opposed to the “purified” literary Sanskrit. From this point of view every vernacular of India, from the earliest times, is a Prakrit. The Rig-Veda itself, composed long before the birth of “purified” Sanskrit, can only be considered as written in an old vernacular, and its language, together with the other contemporary Indo-Aryan dialects which never attained to the honour of “purification,” may be called the Primary Prakrits of India. If we compare literary Sanskrit with classical Latin (see Brandreth, “The Gaurian compared with the Romance Languages,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society xi. (1879), 287; xii. (1880), 335), then these Primary Prakrits correspond to the old Italic dialects contemporary with and related to the literary language of Rome. They were synthetic languages with fairly complicated grammars, no objection to harsh combinations of consonants, and several grammatical forms strange to the classical speech. In the course of centuries (while literary Sanskrit remained stereotyped) they decayed into Secondary Prakrits. These still remained synthetic, and still retained the non-classical forms of grammar, but diphthongs and harsh combinations of consonants were eschewed. They now corresponded to the post-classical Italic dialects. Just as Sanskrit (and the Primary Prakrits) knew of a city called Kauśāmbī, which was known as Kōsambī to the Secondary Prakrits, so the real Umbrian name of the poet known to literature as Plautus was Plot(u)s. Again, as the Latin lactuca became lattuca, so the Primary Prakrit bhakta- became the Secondary bhatta-. In India, the dislike to harsh consonantal sounds, a sort of glottic laziness, finally led to a condition of almost absolute fluidity, each word of the Secondary Prakrits ultimately becoming an emasculated collection of vowels hanging on to an occasional consonant. This weakness brought its own Nemesis and from, say, A.D. 1000 we find in existence the series of modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars, or, as they may be called, Tertiary Prakrits, closely corresponding to the modern Romance languages. Here we find the hiatus between contiguous vowels abolished by the creation of new diphthongs, declensional and conjugational terminations consisting merely of vowels becoming worn away, and new languages appearing, no longer synthetic, but analytic, and again reverting to combinations of consonants under new forms, which had existed three thousand years ago, but which two thousand years of attrition had caused to vanish.