As an adaptation of Latin Arianus referring to Ariana, 'Arian' has "long been in English language use".[11] Its history as a loan word began in the late 18th century, when the word was borrowed from Sanskrit ārya[1] to refer to speakers of North Indian languages.[11] When it was determined that Iranian languages — both living and ancient — used a similar term in much the same way (but in the Iranian context as a self-identifier of Iranian peoples), it became apparent that the shared meaning had to derive from the ancestor language of the shared past, and so, by the early 19th century, the word 'Aryan' came to refer to the group of languages deriving from that ancestor language, and by extension, the speakers of those languages.[12]
Then, in the 1830s, partly based on the theory (now regarded as erroneous) that words like "Aryan" could also be found in European languages (such as the idea that "Éire" derived from "Aryan"), the term "Aryan" came to be used as the term for the Indo-European language group, and by extension, the original speakers of those languages. In the 19th century, "language" was considered a property of "ethnicity", and thus the speakers of the Indo-European languages came to be called the "Aryan race", as contradistinguished from what came to be called the "Semitic race". By the late 19th century, among some people, the notions of an "Aryan race" became closely linked to Nordicism, which posited Northern European racial superiority over all other peoples (including Indians and Iranians). This "master race" ideal engendered both the "Aryanization" programs of Nazi Germany, in which the classification of people as "Aryan" and "non-Aryan" was most emphatically directed towards the exclusion of Jews.[13][n 2] By the end of World War II, the word 'Aryan' had become associated by many with the racial theories and atrocities committed by the Nazi regime.
In colloquial modern English it is often used to signify the Nordic racial ideal promoted by the Nazis. As the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language states at the beginning of its definition, "Aryan, a word nowadays referring to the blond-haired, blue-eyed physical ideal of Nazi Germany, originally referred to a people who looked vastly different. Its history starts with the ancient Indo-Iranians, peoples who inhabited parts of what are now Iran, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh."[9][14]
In Iranian context the original self-identifier lives on in ethnic names like "Alani", "Ir".[15] Similarly,
The word Iran is the Persian word for land/place of the Aryan[16](see also Iranian peoples). In present-day academia, the terms "Indo-Iranian" and "Indo-European" have, according to many, made most uses of the term 'Aryan' obsolete, and 'Aryan' is now mostly limited to its appearance in the term "Indo-Aryan" to represent (speakers of) North, West and Central Indian languages. Notions of an "Aryan race" defined as being composed of those of the Western or European branch of the Indo-European peoples is used in the context of fascist nationalism, an ideology of nationhood defined by ancestry.
In present-day India, the original ethno-linguistic signifier has been less emphasized, the denotation having been semantically supplemented by other, secondary, meanings—the term is widely used in India in the names of business enterprises.[17][18]
