Proto-Indo-Iranian language

Proto-Indo-Iranian
Proto-Indo-Iranic (PIIr)
Reconstruction ofIndo-Iranian languages
RegionEurasian Steppe
Eralate 3rd m. BCE
Reconstructed
ancestor
Lower-order reconstructions

Proto-Indo-Iranian, also called Proto-Indo-Iranic or Proto-Aryan,[1] is the reconstructed proto-language of the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European. Its speakers, the hypothetical Proto-Indo-Iranians, are assumed to have lived in the late 3rd millennium BC, and are often connected with the Sintashta culture of the Eurasian Steppe and the early Andronovo archaeological horizon.

Proto-Indo-Iranian was a satem language, likely removed less than a millennium from its ancestor, the late Proto-Indo-European language, and in turn removed less than a millennium from Vedic Sanskrit (of the Rigveda)[2] and Old Avestan (of the Gathas), its descendants.

It is the ancestor of Indo-Aryan languages, the Iranian languages, and the Nuristani languages, predominantly spoken in the Southern Asian subregion of Eurasia.

  1. ^ Peter Bellwood; Immanuel Ness (10 November 2014). The Global Prehistory of Human Migration. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-118-97059-1.
  2. ^ Hock, Hans Henrich (2015). "Proto-Indo-European verb-finality: Reconstruction, typology, validation". In Kulikov, Leonid; Lavidas, Nikolaos (eds.). Proto-Indo-European Syntax and its Development. John Benjamins.