 In 1786, a guy named William Jones gave a speech that essentially founded the modern field of linguistics. Unfortunately, that same speech was instrumental in creating the idea of an Aryan race. Jones's speech is known today for proposing the existence of the Indo-European language family. The idea that most of the languages of Europe, Iran, and the Indian subcontinent are all variations of what used to be one single language. But at the time, it wasn't clear what to call this language family. Indo-European eventually became the standard, for obvious reasons, but some people wanted to call them the Geophetic Languages after a character from the Bible, and some people in Germany wanted to call them the Indo-Germanic Languages, because of course they did. But some people noticed that at least some of the authors of ancient Sanskrit texts called themselves Aryans, and from there inferred that the original Proto-Indo-Europeans also called themselves Aryans, and thus they preferred to call it the Aryan language family. At the same time that people were fighting over what to call this group of languages, people were also arguing about what the nature of this grouping was exactly, and some pretty weird ideas were getting thrown around. Now, what I'm about to describe will make a lot more sense if you think about the intellectual climate of the 1800s. It hadn't been that long ago since the Enlightenment had called into question the literal accuracy of a lot of biblical narratives, and science was in the process of suggesting a lot of new ideas about the history of the world and the origin of humanity. But at the same time, the out of Africa theory for the origin of humans and our modern understanding of our evolution from chimpanzee-like ancestors was still a long way off. Mix all that uncertainty together with the idea of an Aryan language family, as well as a big old heaping of racism, anti-Semitism, and nationalism, and you get some weird ideas. Ideas like? Maybe the original speakers of proto-Aryan were white people, and all white people are descended from those original Aryan people, and that's where white people come from. Maybe those Aryans conquered India, but then innerbred with the native black population, and that's why modern Indians have brown skin. Maybe this sacred Indian religious symbol was actually a symbol of those ancient Aryans who invaded India. Maybe Aryans innerbred with other races in Europe, too, but who innerbred with who and in what ratios produced all of the different modern European nations, except Germany, which is the only place where there are still pure Aryans. Maybe Jesus, even though he was born to non-Aryan Semitic language-speaking Jews, was miraculously an Aryan, because miracles. Maybe Christianity actually has nothing to do with Judaism, and is actually a direct descendant of Germanic paganism and is a pure Aryan religion. Maybe we should get rid of the Old Testament because it was written by Jews, and maybe the entire Catholic Church is just a Jewish conspiracy, and so is communism, and so is capitalism, and so is everything, and you can probably see where this is going. Now, we're talking about a lot of different people over the span of more than 150 years who were all toying with ideas like this, and they disagreed with each other a lot on the specifics, but these were the kinds of ideas that were being thrown around in the century leading up to the Nazis. But before I talk about them, I'd just like to point out that the whole idea of an Aryan people ancestral to Europeans never made much sense to begin with. Remember how some Sanskrit speakers called themselves Aryans? Well, for one thing, it was only ever the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-Europeans who called themselves that. None of the others did, which makes it look a lot more like this was an innovation of one branch and not something that can be traced back to the root. For another thing, even at the time, they used it more as a sort of cultural signifier to refer to anyone who spoke the language and practiced the Vedic religion. Loads of people in the Vedas are called Aryan even though they clearly have non-Indo-European names, so they obviously didn't think of it as some kind of racial category. Alright, now let's talk about how the Nazis used the word, which is to say, surprisingly little. Like, they did use it, and today we might associate the Nazis with the term very strongly, but for a lot of their purposes, the word was just too inclusive. On one hand, Nazi academics really didn't like it because it referred mostly to a linguistic group, and they knew perfectly well that connecting language to race was not straightforward. Besides, if anyone who spoke an Aryan language was an Aryan, then that would include German-speaking Jews, and they couldn't have that. They prefer to use more specific terms, like Nordic race or German people. On the other hand, there was Nazi propaganda aimed at the masses, which used Aryan a fair amount more, but still not nearly as much as I thought it did when I started doing research for this video. Mostly, they used it in a vaguely pan-European sense, but in a way that specifically excluded Jews. The usual spiel went something like, Aryans are responsible for everything good that ever happened in history, Jews never did anything useful, and that's why Jews suck. Maybe the most ridiculous example of this is how they used it in a legal context. Two laws from 1933 literally defined non-Aryans as anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent. Funny thing, though, the Nazis mostly stopped using the term Aryan in a legal context after 1935 because of those objections from academics. As far as I can tell, neo-Nazis actually liked the term Aryan way more than Nazis ever did, and for the same reason, Aryan has pan-European connotations. That fact made Nazis kind of hesitant to use it, since remember, they were German nationalists who really hated French and Slavic people, but it makes modern white supremacists love the term, especially in the US where most white people have ancestors from all over Europe. So, besides neo-Nazis, the word is still used in a couple other contexts today. The word came to mean something like noble or honorable in India, and is still used there mostly in religious contexts. Meanwhile, in Iran, the word developed more specific ethnic connotations and eventually morphed into the modern word Iran. Linguists mostly stopped using the term to refer to language with the one exception that they still used the term Indo-Aryan to refer to a family of Indo-European languages centered around India. Besides that, they felt a strong desire to distance themselves from the word, for obvious reasons. Thank you patrons, here are some sources, bye!