The Indo-European (IE) Linguistic Spread and the ‘Homeland Problem’ Revisited

Abstract

The nineteenth and early twentieth-century intellectual claim to European ancestry stems from the ‘Aryan Myth’—the linguistic equating of Iranians as direct descendants of Aryans, or Indo-Europeans. The historical genesis of the word ‘Aryan’ was influenced by The First Persian Empire (550-330 B.C.E.) in reference to an Iranian homeland, and by nineteenth-century Western linguists’ associations with the ancestral Indo-Europeans (IE).1 Notable philologists examining the ‘homeland problem’ have shown a standard concern towards the accuracy of scholarship on Indo-European origins. Ara (2008) decodes Indo-European origins and spread that gradually led to affiliations between Indo-Iranians and the ‘Aryan’ label. The onomastics approach would suggest that the proto-language left identifiable clues in the landscape itself (Mallory & Adams, 2006, p. 447). Dyen’s (1956) linguistic migration and homeland theory cites a European homeland accepted since the nineteen hundreds. Nichols’ (1997) analysis of the Indo-European migrations from 4,000 to 3,500 B.C.E. points to a locus of language dispersal within western central Asia (p. 134). Mallory (1989) and Kuzmina (1994a) favor a Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic-Caspian steppe region from the fifth to fourth millennium B.C.E.2 (Lamberg-Karlovsky, 2004, p. 142). The accurate whereabouts of the Indo-European and daughter Indo-Iranian language group have been reviewed from various fields and by abundant methodologies, including the eschatological, anthropological, linguistic, and archaeological—all adding to the convoluted nature of scholarship on the Aryan question. The academic search for an Iranian homeland raises the inquiry of how ethnicity and region become tantamount to politicized and prejudiced topics on the account of misappropriations of a linguistic concept. An archaeological and lexicostatistic excavation of the conservative nature to review the genesis of Aryan homeland origins may help diverge from the aggrandized ethnological, ethnographic, and anthropometric evidence that has ramified an essentialist nomenclature of the Indo-Iranians in the eighteen and nineteen hundreds.