Dardic group of language belongs to which language family?

Correct — A, Indo European. The Dardic languages — Kashmiri, Shina, Khowar, Kalasha, Pashai and their neighbours in the north-western Himalaya and the Hindu Kush — form a group inside the Indo-Aryan branch. Indo-Aryan sits under Indo-Iranian, and Indo-Iranian under Indo-European, so Dardic is Indo-European at the family level. Kashmiri is the member most candidates will already know, because it is the Dardic language listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution.

• (b)Austric — The Austric or Austro-Asiatic family in India covers the Munda languages of the eastern plateau, Khasi in Meghalaya and Nicobarese. None of them is spoken in the Kashmir and Hindu Kush belt where Dardic is.
• (c)Sino-Tibetan — Sino-Tibetan in India means the Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalaya and the north-east — Ladakhi, Bodo, Manipuri, Naga and Mizo among them. Ladakhi is the near neighbour that makes this option tempting, but Kashmiri and Ladakhi belong to different families despite sharing a border.
• (d)Dravidian — Dravidian is overwhelmingly a southern family — Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam — with the outliers Gondi and Kurukh in central India and Brahui in Balochistan. Brahui is the only Dravidian language anywhere near the north-west, and it is not Dardic.

India's languages are grouped into four families that account for almost every speaker — Indo-European, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic and Sino-Tibetan — with the Andamanese languages as a small fifth group. A family is defined by descent from a common ancestor, not by geography, so neighbouring languages can belong to different families and distant ones to the same family. Dardic is a subgroup, and the question is testing whether you can place a subgroup in its family.

The item works by naming a group that most candidates cannot place directly, so the route to the answer is by member. Ask which languages are Dardic; Kashmiri appears; Kashmiri is Indo-Aryan; Indo-Aryan is a branch of Indo-European. Scholars have argued for decades about whether Dardic is a genuine subgroup of Indo-Aryan or simply a name for the Indo-Aryan languages that stayed in the mountains and did not share later plains innovations, but that debate is about the internal level, not about the family — on the family question every side agrees. The Indo-Aryan branch is by a wide margin the largest linguistic group in India by number of speakers.

• Dardic languages include Kashmiri, Shina, Khowar, Kalasha and Pashai, spoken in the north-western Himalaya and the Hindu Kush.
• Kashmiri is the Dardic language included in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution.
• Indo-Aryan is a branch of Indo-Iranian, which is itself a branch of Indo-European.
• Austro-Asiatic in India covers the Munda languages, Khasi and Nicobarese; Sino-Tibetan covers the Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalaya and the north-east.
• Brahui, spoken in Balochistan, is the far north-western outlier of the Dravidian family and is unrelated to the Dardic group.

• Placing a language by where it is spoken rather than by whom it descends from.
• Assuming Kashmiri and Ladakhi belong together because Kashmir and Ladakh do.
• Reading Austric as covering everything tribal — many tribal languages are Tibeto-Burman or Dravidian.

Language-family items usually name either an unfamiliar group or an unfamiliar language; the reliable method is to recall one member you do know and climb the tree from there.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following languages belongs to the Tibeto-Burman group?

  • (a)Kashmiri
  • (b)Bodo
  • (c)Kurukh
  • (d)Konkani

  Answer(b) Bodo — Kashmiri and Konkani are Indo-Aryan and Kurukh is Dravidian.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Brahui, spoken in Balochistan, belongs to which language family?

  • (a)Indo-European
  • (b)Dravidian
  • (c)Sino-Tibetan
  • (d)Austro-Asiatic

  Answer(b) Dravidian — it is the family's far north-western outlier, separated from the southern block by more than a thousand kilometres.