Iranian languages

Term

Iranian languages family tree

The term Iranian is applied to any language which descends from the ancestral Proto-Iranian language.^[8]

This use of the term for the Iranian language family was introduced in 1836 by Christian Lassen.^[9] Robert Needham Cust used the term Irano-Aryan in 1878,^[10] and Orientalists such as George Abraham Grierson and Max Müller contrasted Irano-Aryan (Iranian) and Indo-Aryan (Indic). Some recent scholarship, primarily in German, has revived this convention.^{[11][12][13][14]}

The Iranian languages are divided into the following branches:

• The Western Iranian languages subdivided into:
  • Southwestern, of which Persian is the dominant member;
  • Northwestern, of which the Kurdish languages are the dominant members.
• The Eastern Iranian languages subdivided into:
  • Southeastern, of which Pashto is the dominant member;
  • Northeastern, by far the smallest branch, of which Ossetian is the dominant member.