Proto-Indo-Aryan language
protolanguage of the Indo-Aryan language family
Proto-Indo-Aryan (sometimes Proto-Indic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Indo-Aryan languages. It is intended to reconstruct the language of the Indo-Aryans, who had migrated into the Indian subcontinent. Being descended from Proto-Indo-Iranian (which in turn is descended from Proto-Indo-European), it has the characteristics of a satem language.
History
Proto-Indo-Aryan is meant to be the predecessor of Old Indo-Aryan (1500–300 BCE), which is directly attested as Vedic and Classical Sanskrit, as well as by the Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni. Indeed, Vedic Sanskrit is very close to Proto-Indo-Aryan.
Some of the Prakrits display a few minor features derived from Proto-Indo-Aryan that had already disappeared in Vedic Sanskrit.
Today, numerous modern Indo-Aryan languages are extant.
Differences from Vedic
Despite the great archaicity of Vedic, the other Indo-Aryan languages preserve a small number of conservative features lost in Vedic.
One of these is the representation of Proto-Indo-European *l and *r. Vedic (as also most Iranic languages) merges both as /r/.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q23808344. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1500.
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This entry incorporates text from “Proto-Indo-Aryan language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.