The Indo-Iranian Homeland from a Linguistic Perspective
Map Courtesy - Encyclopedia Britannica The existence of the Indo-European family of Languages is an undisputed fact well accepted in the academic world. It is the realization that a large number of very widely spoken and not so widely spoken languages, that spread across Eurasia in antiquity and now across the world, have a shared common origin. It is, in fact the largest family of languages in the world by population numbers and has been so for thousands of years. It is constituted by languages that are spoken by 95 % of the European population and 80 % of the population of the Indian subcontinent. In between the languages spoken on the Iranian plateau are also largely, around 79 % of them, part of the same family. Those of the Indo-European (IE) languages that are spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent are collectively subsumed under a massive sub-branch known academically as Indo-Iranian (IIr). The Indo-Iranian branch is truly massive even within the