Bharatiya Itihas Chintan

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 wi...

Indo-European languages are spoken by about 95% population of present day Europe. The dominance of Indo-European languages in Europe is greater than in the Indian subcontinent where about 80% population speaks Indo-European, though in absolute numbers, the subcontinent tilts the scales in its favour. In my last post, I had argued for an alternative model of Indo-European language spread in Europe via the Near East and SE Europe. This was strongly objected to by our friend Ashish whose reasoning was that the utter dominance of Indo-European languages in Europe could only have come about through the massive genetic turnover that was brought about in Europe through incursion of steppe groups in the 3rd millennium BCE via Yamnaya and Corded Ware cultures. By contrast, my model does not have such evidence at the genetic level (for now).  Is this objection valid ? Let us ponder upon it. As I said, and as is visible from the above map (taken from wikipedia), Indo-European languages domina...