Aryan

Aryan is a name that ultimately comes from Sanskrit (ārya) meaning “noble, high-born”. From an English-speaking perspective, Aryan refers to the race of people belonging to the Indo-European ethnic and language groups. This essentially includes Albanian, Armenian, Celtic, Germanic, Greek (Hellenic), Indo-Iranian (including Indians), Italian/Latin (Italic) and Slavic (including Baltic). The term Aryan has basically been replaced with terms like Indo-European or Indo-Iranian, but for all intents and purposes it’s merely a word describing certain peoples who evolved from the same language family. For comparison purposes, Hebrew and Arabic are from the Afro-Asiatic language family; Swahili and Yoruba are from the Niger-Congo language family; Chinese is Sino-Tibetan; Japanese, Korean and Turkic are Altaic languages; Hungarian and Finnish are Uralic; and then there are languages completely isolated from the rest and are a language family unto themselves, e.g., the Basque and Eskimo-Aleut. Unfortunately the term Aryan was corrupted by Nazi Germany when they used it as a general term for their own sick ideology. Aryans include Germanic people (Germans, Nordic people, Anglo-Saxons and the such) which Germans took to mean the “master race” or the purest race among all Aryans because they claimed to be less racially mixed than other Aryans (like the Celts, Greeks, Slavs, etc). As a result of the German’s corruption of this term, Aryan became a word with fairly heavy negative connotations after WWII among Westerners and it’s often associated with neo-Nazi skinheads full of small-minded prejudice and extreme intolerance. For Indians, however, the name Aryan still means exactly what the original etymology intended: “noble and high-born” (also related to a Greek word for “aristocrat”). Aryan is the seventh most popular boy’s name in all of India – given its population size – that means there’s a lot of Aryans running around! Aryan is also used with so-so frequency in the countries of Norway, Canada and the United States. But we’re guessing mainly among the Indian citizenry.