"For other uses, see Aryan (disambiguation).
Aryan (IPA: /ˈɛɹiən/) is an English language loanword. As the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language states at the beginning of its definition, "[it] is one of the ironies of history that Aryan, a word nowadays referring to the blond-haired, blue-eyed physical ideal of Nazi Germany, originally referred to a people who looked vastly different. Its history starts with the ancient Indo-Iranians, peoples who inhabited parts of what are now Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India."[1]
As an adaptation of the Latin Arianus, referring to Iran, 'Aryan' has "long been in English language use".[2] Its history as a loan word began in the late 1700s, when the word was borrowed from Sanskrit ā́rya- meaning a speaker of North Indian languages.[2] When it was determined that Iranian languages — both living and ancient — used a similar term in much the same way (but in the Iranian context as a self-identifier of Iranian peoples), it became apparent that the shared meaning had to derive from the ancestor language of the shared past, and so, by the early 1800s, the word 'Aryan' came to refer to the group of languages deriving from that ancestor language, and by extension, the speakers of those languages.[3]
Then, in the 1830s, the term "Aryan" was adopted for speakers of Indo-European languages in general, in the unsubstantiated belief that this was an ethnic self-identifier used by the Proto-Indo-Europeans, i.e., the prehistoric speakers of Proto-Indo-European (this belief could not be substantiated since the Proto-Indo-Europeans had not yet adopted writing). This development was in turn instrumental to the development of the concept of an "Aryan race", which by the early 20th century became closely linked to Nordicism, which posited Northern European racial superiority over all other peoples (including Indians and Iranians). In Nazi Germany the classification of peoples as Aryan or not was most emphatically directed towards the exclusion of Jews.[4][n 1] This racialist interpretation engendered both the "Aryanization" programs of Nazi Germany, and – in a late 19th century British-mediated form – to a racialist reinterpretation of Indian society, texts and history. Following the end of World War II and the discovery of the genocide that the self-styled "Aryans" had caused, the word 'Aryan' ceased to have a positive meaning in general Western understanding. In colloquial modern English it is typically used to signify the Nordic racial ideal promoted by the Nazis.
In present-day India, the original ethno-linguistic signifier has been mostly lost, the denotation having been semantically replaced by other, secondary, meanings. In Iran, the original self-identifier lives on in ethnic names like "Alani", "Ir", and in the name of Iran itself.[5] In present-day academia, the terms "Indo-Iranian" and "Indo-European" have made most uses of the term 'Aryan' obsolete, and 'Aryan' is now mostly limited to its appearance in the term "Indo-Aryan" to represent (speakers of) North Indian languages. Notions of an "Aryan race" only survive in the context of fascist nationalism, in which nationhood is defined by ancestry."
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Originally Posted by Grimner
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