The Inner–Outer hypothesis of the subclassification of the
Indo-Aryan language family argues for a division of the family into two groups, an ''Inner'' core (focused on the
Madhyadeśa in the
Indo-Gangetic plain
The Indo-Gangetic Plain, also known as the North Indian River Plain, is a fertile plain encompassing northern regions of the Indian subcontinent, including most of northern and eastern India, around half of Pakistan, virtually all of Bangla ...
) and an ''Outer'' periphery, evidenced by shared traits of the languages falling into one of the two groups. Proponents of the theory generally believe the distinction to be the result of
gradual migrations of Indo-Aryan speakers into India, with the inner languages representing a second wave of migration speaking a different dialect of
Old Indo-Aryan
The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily concentrated in India, Pa ...
, overtaking the first-wave speakers in the center and relegating them to the outer region.
The Inner–Outer hypothesis has taken many forms in its various iterations since it was proposed by
Rudolf Hoernlé
Augustus Frederic Rudolf Hoernlé CIE (1841 – 1918), also referred to as Rudolf Hoernle or A. F. Rudolf Hoernle, was a German Indologist and philologist. He is famous for his studies on the Bower Manuscript (1891), Weber Manuscript (1893) and ...
in 1880. Some of its notable proponents include
George Abraham Grierson
Sir George Abraham Grierson (7 January 1851 – 9 March 1941) was an Irish administrator and linguist in British India. He worked in the Indian Civil Service but an interest in philology and linguistics led him to pursue studies in the languag ...
(who organised the
Linguistic Survey of India
The Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) is a comprehensive survey of the languages of British India, describing 364 languages and dialects. The Survey was first proposed by George Abraham Grierson, a member of the Indian Civil Service and a linguist w ...
),
Franklin Southworth
Franklin C. Southworth (born 1929) is an American linguist and Professor Emeritus of South Asian linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university i ...
, and
Claus Peter Zoller Claus Peter Zoller is a linguist and professor of South Asian Studies at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages of the University of Oslo. His research interests include Hindi literature and Hindi, linguistics, the languages of the ...
. It has faced a robust opposition, with scholars such as
Suniti Kumar Chatterji
Bhashacharya Acharya Suniti Kumar Chatterjee (26 November 1890 – 29 May 1977) was an Indian linguist, educationist and litterateur. He was a recipient of the second-highest Indian civilian honour of Padma Vibhushan.
Life Childhood
Chatterji ...
and
Colin P. Masica
Colin Paul Masica (June 13, 1931 – February 23, 2022) was an American linguist who was professor emeritus in thDepartment of South Asian Languages and Civilizationsand the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. Besides being a s ...
opposing the theory, and an alternative East–West theory of the top-level subclassification of Indo-Aryan proposed by
John Peterson. Recent work by
Chundra Cathcart and Peterson has sought to tackle the hypothesis with statistical methods; the hypothesis continues to be a contentious proposal with no clear consensus among scholars of Indo-Aryan.
Hypothesis
Nature of the migrations
The general structure of the hypothesis is that there were two groups of Indo-Aryan speakers who migrated into
the subcontinent
The Indian subcontinent is a physiographical region in Southern Asia. It is situated on the Indian Plate, projecting southwards into the Indian Ocean from the Himalayas. Geopolitically, it includes the countries of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India ...
through differing routes and spoke different dialects of
Old Indo-Aryan
The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily concentrated in India, Pa ...
. This is meant to explain commonalities between the Outer languages (specifically the
Eastern Indo-Aryan languages
The Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, also known as Māgadhan languages, are spoken throughout the eastern Indian subcontinent (East India and Assam, Bangladesh), including Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bengal, Tripura, Assam, and Odisha; alongs ...
and
Sindhi,
Gujarati
Gujarati may refer to:
* something of, from, or related to Gujarat, a state of India
* Gujarati people, the major ethnic group of Gujarat
* Gujarati language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by them
* Gujarati languages, the Western Indo-Aryan sub- ...
,
Marathi
Marathi may refer to:
*Marathi people, an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group of Maharashtra, India
*Marathi language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Marathi people
*Palaiosouda, also known as Marathi, a small island in Greece
See also
*
* ...
, and associated smaller lects) that are not found in the Madhyadeśa region.
Hoernlé's original formulation in 1880 of the Inner–Outer hypothesis was an initial Māgadhan invasion (at this time, the migration of Indo-Aryans was considered to be an invasion, a theory now largely refuted) into the Indo-Gangetic plain, followed by a second Śaurasenī invasion that pushed the earlier Aryans outwards into the south, east, and west. He further thought that
Pashto
Pashto (,; , ) is an Eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family. It is known in historical Persian literature as Afghani ().
Spoken as a native language mostly by ethnic Pashtuns, it is one of the two official languages ...
and the
Nuristani languages
The Nuristani languages, formerly known as Kafiri languages, are one of the three groups within the Indo-Iranian language family, alongside the much larger Indo-Aryan and Iranian groups. They have approximately 130,000 speakers primarily in ea ...
belonged to the Outer Māgadhan group. Grierson calls this the wedge theory and does not accept it in its entirety, but agrees in the political result, adding that there is textual evidence of hostility between the two groups in e.g. ''
Mahābhārata
The ''Mahābhārata'' ( ; sa, महाभारतम्, ', ) is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India in Hinduism, the other being the ''Rāmāyaṇa''. It narrates the struggle between two groups of cousins in the Kuruk ...
'', in which the Indus Aryans are called ''mleccha'' "~barbarians".
The most recent iteration of the theory is by
Franklin Southworth
Franklin C. Southworth (born 1929) is an American linguist and Professor Emeritus of South Asian linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university i ...
. His hypothesis states that at the time of the
Rigveda
The ''Rigveda'' or ''Rig Veda'' ( ', from ' "praise" and ' "knowledge") is an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns (''sūktas''). It is one of the four sacred canonical Hindu texts (''śruti'') known as the Vedas. Only one Sh ...
, the Indo-Aryans resided in the upper
Indus valley
The Indus ( ) is a transboundary river of Asia and a trans-Himalayan river of South and Central Asia. The river rises in mountain springs northeast of Mount Kailash in Western Tibet, flows northwest through the disputed region of Kashmir, ...
and had largely lost contact with
Iranian speakers. Some dialectal variation was already present at this stage but the Inner and Outer groups had not split. The Inner Indo-Aryan speakers, associated with the post-Rigvedic textual tradition of
Hinduism
Hinduism () is an Indian religion or '' dharma'', a religious and universal order or way of life by which followers abide. As a religion, it is the world's third-largest, with over 1.2–1.35 billion followers, or 15–16% of the global p ...
, then migrated directly into the Madhyadeśa, while the Outer IA speakers took a path south into
Sindh
Sindh (; ; ur, , ; historically romanized as Sind) is one of the four provinces of Pakistan. Located in the southeastern region of the country, Sindh is the third-largest province of Pakistan by land area and the second-largest province ...
, then east to the
Deccan
The large Deccan Plateau in South India, southern India is located between the Western Ghats and the Eastern Ghats, and is loosely defined as the peninsular region between these ranges that is south of the Narmada river. To the north, it is bou ...
and
Malwa
Malwa is a historical region of west-central India occupying a plateau of volcanic origin. Geologically, the Malwa Plateau generally refers to the volcanic upland north of the Vindhya Range. Politically and administratively, it is also syno ...
, and finally to the east into
Bengal
Bengal ( ; bn, বাংলা/বঙ্গ, translit=Bānglā/Bôngô, ) is a geopolitical, cultural and historical region in South Asia, specifically in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal, predom ...
by the time of
Aśoka
Ashoka (, ; also ''Asoka''; 304 – 232 BCE), popularly known as Ashoka the Great, was the third emperor of the Maurya Empire of Indian subcontinent during to 232 BCE. His empire covered a large part of the Indian subcontinent, s ...
. The Inner and Outer languages regrouped around
Awadh
Awadh (), known in British historical texts as Avadh or Oudh, is a region in the modern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which was before independence known as the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. It is synonymous with the Kośāla region of ...
, leading to dialect mixture in that area (reflected in Grierson's classification of those languages as intermediate between Inner and Outer IA).
Language groupings
The basic agreed-upon part of the hypothesis by its proponents from the very beginning is that modern Marathi–Konkani and Bengali–Assamese–Odia share more features with each other than with the other Indo-Aryan languages. Thus, they form the backbone of the Outer language family. Grouping of the transitional language is more thorny; most formulations of the theory add Gujarati, Sindhi, and the
Bihari languages
Bihari is a group of the Indo-Aryan languages. The Bihari languages are mainly spoken in the Indian states of Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh and also in Nepal.Brass, Paul R. (1974). ''Language, Religion and Politics in North ...
to the Outer family, while there is more contention (and lack of data) in categorising Western Punjabi, Dardic, Sinhala–Dhivehi, and Pahari. Eastern Hindi is thought to be transitional between Inner and Outer.
Below are the groupings proposed by proponents of the hypothesis.
noted that the big issue in grouping Indo-Aryan languages firmly into either group is the presence of dialect stratification; large
koiné languages such as Hindi and Bengali, or the older Dramatic Prakrits, engaged in dialect levelling that obscured their belonging to either group, and local village dialects may have a very different composition of features that are unfortunately not historically preserved. He takes a more nebulous view of the grouping into Inner and Outer:
For him, Nuristani, Dardic, and West Pahari are among the most Outer languages, transitional into Old Iranian historically. Within branches, Zoller claims Assamese and Odia have more Outer features than Bengali, and Konkani has more than Marathi.
Evidence
Linguistic evidence
The evidence underlying the hypothesis is shared innovations between the Outer languages. Zoller narrows the proof for the hypothesis down to two criteria: the Outer languages must show some
Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-E ...
feature that is not reflected in Vedic Sanskrit (thus proving that they descend from a different OIA dialect) and also they must show stronger substrate influence from
Dravidian and
Munda (thus proving that they represent an earlier migration).
Grierson's linguistic evidence was almost entirely refuted by Chatterji; some of the points that were discarded in modern formulations of the hypothesis are the preservation of final short vowels in semi-tatsamas (e.g. Bihari ''mūratⁱ'' "idol"), the movement of the Outer languages towards a more
synthetic Synthetic things are composed of multiple parts, often with the implication that they are artificial. In particular, 'synthetic' may refer to:
Science
* Synthetic chemical or compound, produced by the process of chemical synthesis
* Synthetic o ...
paradigm, and various innovative developments of the sibilants (''s'' > ''ś'', ''h'', ''x''). However, Grierson's primary evidence of the past in ''-l-'' has remained the most important piece of linguistic evidence in all forms of the hypothesis.
Southworth, based on the earlier work by Grierson, adds historical correlates of these features in the
Ashokan Prakrit inscriptions (the northwestern inscriptions reflect a different dialect from the eastern and western ones) and potentially as early as the dialectal variation of
Vedic Sanskrit
Vedic Sanskrit was an ancient language of the Indo-Aryan subgroup of the Indo-European language family. It is attested in the Vedas and related literature compiled over the period of the mid- 2nd to mid-1st millennium BCE. It was orally preser ...
. He also tightens the diagnostic evidence of the grouping, focusing only on ''exclusively shared innovations'' as a basis for genetic classification of languages. His evidence is:
* Past forms in ''-l-'': This form is found in the Outer IA languages to mark the past indicative and/or the past/perfective participle. Evidence suggests that it was suffixed (rather than replacing) to the original past form in Sanskrit with ''-ta'', e.g.: OIA ''ga-ta'' "gone" > MIA ''*ga-y-alla'' > Marathi ''gelā''. The morpheme ''-alla/ulla/illa-'' was widespread in Middle Indo-Aryan as a general adjectival suffix (e.g. Hindi ''ag-lā'' "next" < MIA ''agg-alla''). Southworth's examination of textual evidence finds that the past in ''-l-'' is earliest found in Marathi, with variable attestation in the Eastern IA languages, suggesting a diffusion of the change from west to east rather than a fully shared innovation. Nevertheless, this is the strongest example of a shared Outer feature.
* Verb forms in ''-(i)tavya'': This was generalised into a gerund, an infinitive, and the future tense from its necessitative use in late OIA, while the inner languages have a gerund and infinitive < OIA ''-anīya'' and assorted future forms.
* Phonological change ''r̥'' > ''a'': The vocalic rhotic ''r̥'' was changing into a non-rhotic vowel by the OIA stage, as evidenced by changes such as Proto-Indo-Iranian ''r̥H'' > OIA ''īr/ūr'' and variant forms in Vedic. There is a split by the time of Ashokan Prakrit of the reflex ''i'' in the Northwest and ''a'' elsewhere (i.e. in the East and West, corresponding to Outer IA). A modern example is OIA ''mr̥ttikā'' "earth" > Punjabi ''miṭṭī'' but Bengali ''māṭī'', Marathi ''mātī''.
* Loss of length contrast in ''i/u'': The length distinction from OIA ''i'' ~ ''ī'' and ''u'' ~ ''ū'' is lost in Outer languages, becoming positionally determined.
* Word-initial accent: The Inner languages have a weight-based stress accent while the Outer language have a default initial-syllable accent, reflected by vowel lengthening in that position, e.g. OIA ''karpāsa'' > Hindi ''kapās'', but Marathi ''kāpus'', Bengali ''kāpās''.
* Phonological change ''l'' > ''n'': This change is largely confined to
Maithili and broadly Eastern IA, but Southworth suggests cases of lexical diffusion from east to west bypassing the Madhyadeśa languages, and thus linguistic links between the two that persisted quite late.
further claimed that only the first feature is necessary to judge an Outer subfamily, by linking it to the Indo-European adjectival suffix ''*-ulo/elo/ilo-'' and ''*-ah₂-lo-, *-eh₁-lo-'' that is not preserved as broadly in Vedic Sanskrit (besides individual lexical items such as ''bahulá'' "thick"). He notes similar developments of a gerund in Tocharian and participle forms in Slavic. The gemination in the MIA forms is explained as a reflex of PIE ''*-Vl-yo'' as in Tocharian. He also suggested that the ''d'' ~ ''ḍ'' alternation and ''c, j'' > ''ċ, (d)z'' (in Nuristani, Dardic, and Pahari) are relevant features to the hypothesis but left their investigation for future work.
For Zoller, further linguistic evidence lied in substrate influence from Munda, Tibeto-Burman, and Dravidian found in the Outer languages. He postulates that north India was largely Munda-speaking, citing Munda substrata in the West Himalayish languages. He goes on to cite parallels between syllable structure in West Pahari and Munda (the ''sesquisyllabic structure''), convergence of ideophones in Indo-Aryan with Munda, consonant fluctuations in Outer IA ''deśī'' vocabulary and Munda, and lexical parallels between Munda, Tibeto-Burman, Burushaski, and Outer IA.
Textual evidence
There is a historical split between the Indo-Aryans of the Madhyadeśa region (focused on modern-day western Uttar Pradesh, and more generally the Indo-Gangetic plain) and Indo-Aryans of other regions. Religious texts divide the lands of India into ''ārya'' "Aryan" and ''mleccha'' "barbarian", the latter including all of the non-Madhyadeśa regions even after their Aryanisation and adoption of Indo-Aryan languages. Grammarians such as
Patañjali
Patanjali ( sa, पतञ्जलि, Patañjali), also called Gonardiya or Gonikaputra, was a Hinduism, Hindu author, mystic and philosopher. Very little is known about him, and while no one knows exactly when he lived; from analysis of his ...
relate that the dialect of the Asuras (demons) had the change ''r'' > ''l'', a distinctly eastern Indo-Aryan change. Listings such as the
Pañca-draviḍa group Gujarat and Maharashtra with the non-Indo-Aryan Deccan.
Debate
The first point-by-point refutation of the Inner–Outer hypothesis was by , in response to the evidence put forth in . All of the phonological and morphological features connecting the Outer languages cited by Grierson were found to be either coincidental retentions (only shared innovations are diagnostic of language relations) or faultily grouped. As an example, he strikes down the retention of final short vowels as an Outer feature, noting that (1) the loss of short vowels is in-progress in all Indo-Aryan languages, just at different stages presently, and (2) this is not a shared innovation and thus not diagnostic of a language grouping. As notes, "Chatterji's rejection of the hypothesis brought the discussion to an effective standstill until it was revived almost hundred years later by Franklin Southworth."
Georg Morgenstierne
Georg Valentin von Munthe af Morgenstierne (2 January 1892 – 3 March 1978) was a Norwegian professor of linguistics with the University of Oslo (UiO). He specialized in Indo-Iranian languages.
Studies
During the years 1923 to 1971, Morgenst ...
apparently rejected the hypothesis, instead arguing that supposedly "Inner" linguistic isoglosses (e.g. medial aspiration in the word for "sister") represented later innovations in that area that radiated but did not reach the "Outer" languages.
After Southworth's work was published, responded, "I think it fair to say that these
outhworth'sconclusions are not sufficiently backed up by detailed facts about the chronology of changes to merit their being accepted as established"; that is to say, for many of the supposed differences between Inner and Outer, there is no compelling historical evidence attesting that they reflect OIA divisions and not more recent changes or areal diffusions.
conducted a probabilistic assessment of the Inner–Outer hypothesis using various statistical approaches to modelling sound change (adopting the suggestion of phonology-first analysis put forth by Masica) based on data from the ''Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages'' compiled by
Ralph Lilley Turner
Sir Ralph Lilley Turner (5 October 1888 – 22 April 1983) was a British philologist of Indian languages and a university administrator. He is notable for composing an Indo-Aryan comparative dictionary. He is also the author of some publicatio ...
. His
logistic normal distribution
In probability theory, a logit-normal distribution is a probability distribution of a random variable whose logit has a normal distribution. If ''Y'' is a random variable with a normal distribution, and ''t'' is the standard logistic function, th ...
model found evidence for a core-periphery distinction while the
Dirichlet distribution
In probability and statistics, the Dirichlet distribution (after Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet), often denoted \operatorname(\boldsymbol\alpha), is a family of continuous multivariate probability distributions parameterized by a vector \boldsymb ...
model is less convincing. Cathcart concluded that "neither model provides full support for" the Inner-outer hypothesis, but there is "at least vague support for an areal core and periphery" that could be in line with Zoller's model but not with Southworth's.
Without taking a side on the debate, studied isoglosses from a diachronic perspective in
morphosyntactic alignment
In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the grammatical relationship between Argument (linguistics), arguments—specifically, between the two arguments (in English, subject and object) of transitive verbs like ''the dog chased the cat'', an ...
in Awadhi (a transitional language) and
V2 word order
In syntax, verb-second (V2) word order is a sentence structure in which the finite verb of a sentence or a clause is placed in the clause's second position, so that the verb is preceded by a single word or group of words (a single constituent). ...
in Kashmiri (thought to be Outer), and compared both to Pahari in order to make sense of Zoller's Inner–Outer hypothesis and Peterson's East–West hypothesis. They argued that synchronic features are not sufficient for assessing the validity of these hypotheses, as shown by the complex history and boundaries of the features they examined.
Alternative hypotheses
Following work on the structural typology of Indo-Aryan, Munda, and Dravidian, proposed an East–West split in Indo-Aryan, with Eastern Indo-Aryan and Bihari undergoing historical convergence with Munda due to a long period of contact. Some of the Eastern features he put forth supporting this proposal are lack of ergativity, loss of gender marking, numeral classifiers, lack of oblique nominal stems, and lack of attributive agreement. He does not explicitly reject the Inner–Outer hypothesis in the text, but his grouping puts Marathi–Konkani as closer to the Central IA languages (e.g. Hindi) than to Eastern IA, so it is incompatible with the Inner–Outer hypothesis.
References
Notes
Further reading
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Inner-Outer hypothesis
Indo-Aryan languages
Indo-Aryan peoples
Indo-Aryan archaeology
Linguistic history of India
Linguistic history of Pakistan