Muslim rulers of Pakistan and South Asia

Just watch my videos:

The different peoples of the Indus Valley and their possible origins

Let's begin with the first question of who were the people of the Indus Valley Civilization? What cults/religion(s) did they follow? What language(s) did they speak?
These questions even today still remain unanswerable.

However from what is so far known, they were not Indo-European, neither was their language(s).
Many Indian sources claim them to be be Dravidians or Elamites, the supposed close relatives of the Dravidians. The theory goes further to state that they were pushed south and scattered by Aryan invasions, which resulted in them being found in south India mostly and the Brahuis who are an isolated group of Dravidians.

This theory has been rejected by many Pakistani historians and archeologists. Some have claimed that the Brahuis are descendants of recent Dravidian nomads who came and settled in present-day Balochistan.
Other sources point more westward towards Iran, where the ancient Elamites lived.
Many have also rejected the presence of Dravidians in the Pakistan region and that the decedents of the Indus Valley are present-day Pakistanis.

Though I am no qualified expert, my research and understanding has led me to believe that the Indus Valley region/Pakistan has been a home to Dravidians or at least had a strong influence of Dravidian language/culture possibly going as far back as the time of the Aryan invasion(s).
Though lack of genetic evidence exists and the Haplogroup L maps show lack of Dravidian markers present in Pakistan (haplogroup L has been associated with Dravidians as opposed to the Haplogroup R found mostly in Indo-European speaking peoples), linguistic evidence still remains.

The presence of heavy Dravidian-sounding consonants in Indo-Aryan languages of Pakistan especially Sindhi, points only to a likely Dravidian origin. In fact, many in Pakistan mistake Sindhi for a Dravidian language because of it's sound.
Not only, Sindhi and Punjabi, but almost every Indo-Aryan language that I have heard being spoken (including my native Urdu/Undri) carry to a certain degree what appears to be Dravidian lexical influences.

Certain Pakistani linguists and historians had even hypothesized that the people of Pakistan could be Dravidians who adapted to Indo-European languages from the invaders.

Dravidian consonants in the Indo-Aryan languages of Pakistan represented in Perseo-Arabic script:
ٹ Letter name tay. Pronounced t'd
ڈ Letter name daal. Pronounced d'd
ڑ Letter name ray. Pronounced r'd

All the consonants listed are used in Dravidian languages.
Sindhi, Rajesthani, Punjabi, Bengali seem to use them a lot. They are hardly heard in Urdu in comparison, but still used occasionally.

In fact, no other branches in Indo-European that I know of use these consonants (and perhaps vowels).

Based on the location of Pakistan's Indo-Aryan languages about a thousand miles from South India, can the presence of these consonants be coincidental then?
This question only strengthens the theory of Dravidian presence in other parts of the subcontinent till a certain point.

Because no physical linkages have been found between Dravidians and the people of the Indus Valley (including anthropological findings by Proffessor Ahmed Hassan Dani), I have disagreed with the theory of the Indus Valley Civilization being Dravidian, but not ruled it out completely yet.

My personal theory is that the Indus Valley people were washed away by natural disasters. Evidence of this was found in Mohenjo-daro which was contained houses and people covered in mud.

Those who survived, were assimilated or destroyed by the Aryan invaders, since sources do state that evidence exists of battles between the IVC people and the Aryan invaders. Apparently pieces of weaponry and fossils are parts of this evidence.

With the IVC people gone, the Dravidians came and settled into the possibly uninhabited lands. When exactly or even approximately they came is hard to say.
Perhaps the land was already inhabited by a new race of IVC people and Aryans mixed together.

But with many historians also theorizing the Dravidians coming from more northward and small pockets still found in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, the evidence of their presence in other parts of the region, outside of South India remains undeniable.
There has also been linguistic evidence pointing the Dravidians all the way far north of Asia towards regions around the Ural and Altay mountain regions.

Based on similar linguistic findings between Altaic and Dravidian, hypothetical links have been proposed. (People should remember these links are not proven in anyway and are only proposed based on evidence found so far).
A similar finding pointed a possible relationship to Finno-Ugric languages, a subfamily of the Uralic family. These are based on similar vocabulary and common grammar.
Grammatically speaking Uralic, Altaic and Dravidian languages are all considered agglutinative languages.
However, these theories suggesting a common origin or even a connection for the three mentioned language families still remain unproven.

Coming back to the possibility of Dravidian presence in Pakistan; the linguistic evidence remains.

Again the Dravidian consonants in the Indo-Aryan languages of Pakistan represented in Perseo-Arabic script:
ٹ Letter name t'day. Pronounced t'd
ڈ Letter name d'taal. Pronounced d'd
ڑ Letter name r'day. Pronounced r'd

There are also perhaps vowels in Indo-Aryan languages pronounced similarly to Dravidian languages as opposed to their first cousins the Iranic languages.
The absence of certain vowel pronunciations common to Iranic languages are absent in Indo-Aryan languages similarly in the case of Dravidian.

For example, the lack of near-open front unrounded vowel (A in English) /æ/ as in 'sack' is noticeably mostly absent in Indo-Aryan languages, as opposed to their Iranic cousins.
Noticeable Iranic languages like Pashto or Farsi can be found containing it and similar vowels and pronunciations absent in most Indo-Aryan languages.

As an example the Farsi word b-æ-t shoh for King whereas Urdu would be b-aa-t Sh-aah.
Or a clear Pashto pronunciation of the Urdu/Undri word for Sahab (Sa-h-aab) meaning Sir would be Sa-æ-h-æ-b.

Similarly, with the case of the pronunciation of O. In major Iranic languages like Farsi (Central Iranic) or Pashto (Eastern Iranic), O can be pronounced as an open back rounded vowel ('short O' in English). Or even the Shoh in B-æ-t Shoh.
This is not present in all the Indo-Aryan languages I've come across such as Sindhi, Punjabi or my native Urdu.

As an example 'Nadir' can be pronounced in Farsi and Pashto as N-o-dir, whereas in Urdu/Undri the pronunciation is flat Naa-dir.

Note: Iranic languages in Pakistan might use r'd d'd or t'd due to word borrowing from Indo-Aryan languages or even from Brahui.

While Iranic languages can use flat vowel pronunciations, Indo-Aryan languages cannot near-open front unrounded vowel pronunciation or so it seems.

These videos of Pakistani patriotic songs show the difference of vowel usage in Pashto (Iranic) and Urdu/Undri (Indo-Aryan). Even if you speak only one or neither of these languages, you will still be able to see the difference in vowel usage.

In the first video of a song in Pashto you can hear the pronunciation of word for world as "doonya" using oʊ close mid-rounded vowel:


In the case of Urdu it is rather different with the word for world in this video pronounced "dunya." Notice how the pronunciation is rather flat compared to the Pashto song:


Though the Pashto and other Iranic languages spoken in Pakistan have ٹ in their alphabetical system, I believe it was borrowed because other Iranic languages such as Farsi do not seem to contain it or similar sounds, plus ڈ or ڑ etc. are rarely used in Pashto.

This brings an interesting question that could argue against Dravidian impact on Indo-Aryan peoples and languages and the similarities being purely coincidental. Why do Indo-Aryan languages have similar pronunciations to Dravidian languages (some far less, while others much more), yet are related grammatically/genetically to their Iranic cousins which have none or no significant use of these consonants and vowels?

After thinking of this question, I had theorized for a while that the 'Aryan' invasion occurred in at least two separate waves. The ancestors of the Indo-Aryan speaking peoples of Pakistan and other parts of South Asia arrived first sometime between the 12th and 20th century BC.

They brought what became the Sanskrit language and then later on the modern Indo-Aryan languages. They settled around what at that time was a Dravidian majority area and co-existed with the Dravidians, exchanging aspects of language and culture with them and it is likely race mixing also took place. (though haplogroup maps do not show a high occurrence of Indo-European peoples breeding with the Dravids).

There are also plenty of words found to be shared between Sanskrit and Dravidian languages.

It was later on in a second wave(s) that the ancestors of Iranic speaking Pakistanis and others in the region came and settled in present-day Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan.
By this time most of the Dravidian populations had moved further south with the exception of a few. This could be due to the possible pressure from the growth of the Indo-Iranic speaking populations or even enforced by the Indo-Iranics.
Nothing can be proven as of yet.

Only later did I find on Wikipedia that this two-wave theory of mine is shared by a Finnish professor Asko Porpala.

This could possibly explain how a common Indo-Iranic language family broke into Iranic and Indo-Aryan from centuries of geographic separation and exposure to other language families adding to the differences between the two.
Refer to the chart below: (click on images to enlarge)

Dravidian languages to my knowledge do not carry near-open front pronunciations of their vowels either; further evidence that the Indo-Aryans might have come before the Iranics and adapted to Dravidian pronunciations; forgetting their original use of vowels and some consonants which may have included similar or even the same pronunciations as their close Iranic relatives.

Readers will have noticed I have not mentioned the Dardic subfamily in this post and how it split from Proto-Indo-Iranic.
Though, I do not recall hearing a Dardic language ever spoken before, I have read somewhat on them. From all the sources I have read on them, I believe that the Dardic languages in their early form(s) arrived together or at least approximately around the same time era as the Indo-Aryan languages.

This is because a lot of sources I came across claim Dardic and Indo-Aryan languages to form a single subbranch in the Indo-Iranic family. Some linguists call the Indo-Aryan family "Indic" and put it next to Dardic inside Indo-Aryan.
Others call Dardic "Northern Indo-Aryan."

But many other linguists recognize it as a separate branch of it's own inside the Indo-Iranic family. There were additional sources that stated the absence of the consonants mentioned above earlier in this (and perhaps vowels) in languages like Kashmiri.

So because of some of those who bring it closer to Indo-Aryan, I then held the theory that the Proto-Dardic speakers came with or around the first wave of Indo-Iranic peoples and have a close linguistic proximity to Indo-Aryan languages than to Iranic languages.

The reason for the absence of Dravidian-like consonants in Dardic languages I theorized (remember these are just theories, not proven facts) is because while the Dards did come in the first wave(s) of the Aryan invasion, the remote mountainous regions they are found in today was where they settled, keeping them isolated from the Indo-Aryans and Dravidians further south.
This prevented Dravidian influence on their languages which also started to evolve separately in grammar from Indo-Aryan.

Genetically speaking as well, many sources I came across state people of Kashmir as having the highest frequencies of Haplogroup R1A in them, which means they mixed much less with other races. This further indicates a long term separation from their Indo-Aryan relatives and other people(s) of non-Indo-European descent in the region, save for a few tribes in the Northern Areas of Pakistan like the Hunza or the Baltistanis.

Haplogroup maps also attest to this, showing a higher frequency of R1A towards Northern Pakistan:


The first invasions by Indo-European (IE) speaking tribes could have started between the 17th and 15th centuries BC as most historians theorize who's decedents are today in Northern India belonging to Haplogroup R2.

The ancestors of modern-day Pakistanis seem to have arrived somewhat later in mostly likely at least two invasions one by the Indo-Aryans and second by the Iranics.
Refer to the haplogroup map below:


If the scientists have the haplogroup tests correct, it clearly shows Pakistanis (Kashmiris included) being closer to Eastern European populations than to other South Asian ones.

It also could be that North Indians even came and settled into present day India without even entering the Indus Valley and disturbing the (possibly Dravidian) inhabitants there.
Those people were displaced somewhat later by later Aryan arrivals who's descendants are the modern Pakistanis.

This would be the only reasonable explanation as to why Pakistan has a much higher R1A frequency shared with eastern Europe while Northern India has mostly R2. R2 markers have been found in the Caucasus and Europe, but those are in small frequencies most likely due to migration and race mixing.

Indus Valley script tablets:


Linguists, archeologists and historians have been unsuccessful at decoding them, so it's unfair to claim it to be a Dravidian civilization or any other.
It also could be that these people who ever they were survived to witness the Aryan invasion(s) and lived to fight it.

Another possibility is a remainder of their dead language family is Burushaski, the language of the Hunza people, which survived due to the remote areas it's speakers settled in and managed to evade the various Aryan invasions. Because it is a language of non-Indo-European origin, it could be the remainder of the language family(s) of the IVC; though this theory of mine could be entirely wrong.

Only further research and evidence will bring us closer to the facts.

Myths and facts about Lashkari ('urdu')

Many people have the false impression, especially those illiterate in the field of linguistics, that 'Urdu', or natively Lashkari, is an "admixture" of Persian (Parsi), Arabic and Turkish because of it's vocabulary.
This notion is false.

In the rules of linguistics, borrowed words do not reflect a languages' grammatical structure. In the case of Lashkari), the input of vocabulary from Chagatai, Arabic and Farsi should hardly be surprising to anyone.

Almost every spoken language today carries borrowed vocabulary from a different language(s) weather related or unrelated. It does not reflect the languages' grammatical structure. It's the grammatical components which include phonetics, morphological usages, phonology, syntax and semantics which determines a languages' family classification as well as key fundamental concepts present/absent depending on the language.

Closely related languages generally have all these grammatical components common to them. Distantly related languages have only some of these grammatical components common to them but almost always have common semantics and morphology.

Borrowed words have no relevance when studying a languages' grammatical structure and it's genetic relationship to other languages.

Take for example the English word "Tycoon" borrowed from Japanese meaning rich, powerful person. Now only a fool would consider English a "relative" of Japanese or consider Japanese as some sort of 'factor language' to English because of a borrowed word(s).

Similarly the Arabic and Chagatai words in what is today called 'Urdu' or Lashkari do not really make it their "relative" or a "product" of these languages.

As the charts below show, Urdu is an Indo-European language, meaning it is not related to Arabic or Turkish. Arabic is an Afro-Asiatic language and Turkish is an Altaic language. Neither the Afro-Asiatic nor Altaic family have been proven to be related to the Indo-European family, though there is the Nostratic theory which claims the language families of Altaic, Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European, Uralic and Dravidian belong to a common super language family. So far this theory is still unproven.

While mentioning Turkish, Farsi and Arabic, I'd like to draw upon the fact that they carry heavy vocabulary borrowed from one another.
In fact a lot of Lashkari's Arabic vocabulary was inherited through Farsi and the Turkic language of the Mughals, which was already carrying heavy Arabic vocabulary for centuries.

So why is it then that Turkish (or any other language for that matter) is not called a "mix" of Arabic and Parsi? The answer linguistics gives us is the same: borrowing words does not constitute a languages' family status.

The Afro-Asiatic language family tree: (click on images to enlarge)


The Altaic language family tree:

The Indo-European language family tree. A basic chart as it doesn't include many subfamilies such as Dardic or Anatolian, you can still spot the major Indo-European languages such as English & Urdu:


So why do then people ignorantly think of Urdu to be a "mixture of languages?" Many reasons can be provided for this:

Borrowed vocabulary- This is the main reason. However as stated before, almost every language borrowed vocabulary from other languages, provided there is no grammar conflict between the borrowed word and the language borrowing it.
If people observed this better in other languages, this misconception would not exist. Sindhi is said to have more Arabic vocabulary than Lashakri, yet it is not called a "mixed language." Arabic words can be found in Pashto, Parsi, Kashmiri, Balochi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Turkish etc.


The people who spoke Urdu were the Mughals who were a Turko-Persian force- The Mughals developed Urdu by deriving it from Sanskrit. They were an empire ruled by Persians but with an army of mainly ethnic Turko-Mongols.
This did not mean it was their native language. Prior to the adoption of Urdu as their official court language, they used Persian/Farsi. At one time they also spoke Turkic languages.
This is where Urdu/Lashkari gained most of it's Turkic, Persian and Arabic vocabulary (mostly gained through Persian which contains many Arabic loanwords).

The belief that Urdu is a Turkic word- Actually Urdu is derived from the word Ordu used in many Turkic languages meaning "army."
The general consensus is that before Hindi/Hindui and Urdu/Lashkari are two independent dialects of one Hindustani language.
The term "Hindu" does not refer to the people today perceived as 'Hindus.' See The Invention of the Hindu and The English Invention of Hinduism.

When Hindustani came into existence during the Mughal era, it slowly started to be known as "Zaban-i-Ordu" meaning language of the royal army camp. Eventually for short is became just known as Ordu for short and eventually re-pronounced as Urdu, which the locals referred to as Lashkari in native translation.

With the rise of the Hindutva propaganda against the Muslims, resentment rose over the use of Turkic, Arabic and Parsi vocabulary in Hindustani. This resulted in the inserting of Sanskrit words never used before in Hindustani to replace the Arabic, Turkic and Farsi words.
And with the resentment over a name from a Chagatai derived word, Hindi was their own name for the language.

The fact that the Mughals (a corruption of the word Mongol) spoke and developed a language derived from Sanskrit did not mean it was native to them. Their attempts to speak languages native to the subcontinent was a result of an attempt to communicate with the surrounding Indo-Iranic speaking populations they had settled within.

Anyone regardless of nationality or ethnicity can speak any language of any family. This does not change the status of the language or the person speaking it.

Urdu uses the Persio-Arabic script; hence people believe it is closer to the languages spoken in the Middle East- The usage of any particular script does not reflect the structure or a family status of a language.
For example modern Turkish uses the Latin script, it does not make it a relative of languages spoken in Europe.

A sample of the modern Turkish script:

Bütün insanlar hür, haysiyet ve haklar bakımından eşit doğarlar. Akıl ve vicdana sahiptirler ve birbirlerine karşı kardeşlik zihniyeti ile hareket etmelidirler.

Prior to that there was the Ottoman Turkish language which used the same Perseo-Arabic script. Prior to that, the Turkic peoples used their own indigenous script before adopting Perso-Arabic script. Here is an artifact found in North Eastern Asia:


Here is a more accurate sample of the original Turkic alphabet:



Parsi (Persian) is also another language that today uses Perseo-Arabic script with modifications to suit the language (which is the reason why it's called Perseo-Arabic script), but it has not changed the Indo-European roots of the language.
Prior to the adoption of Perso-Arabic script by Persian speakers, the language had it's own script in ancient times:


Likewise, the application of Perso-Arabic script to Lashkari does not change it's Indo-European status.

Another example is Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian use Latin script for their languages. But this does not make them relatives of other European languages.
Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian are still Uralic languages.

Urdu's roots can be traced back to Sanskrit, which all Indo-Aryan languages are traced to. This language is said to have used Devanāgarī alphabet.

Pseudoscience propagated by Islamists- This is a key factor to misconceptions. Islamists despise Urdu's pre-Islamic roots and don't want to be associated with it so they spread bogus ideas such as Muhammed Bin Qasim being "the first Pakistani" or Urdu having Arabic and Turkic roots.
Islamists have always tried to link Pakistanis with the Middle East and taught them without Islam they are simply "Indians" which is another lie, since the people of Pakistan lived in the land of Pakistan for thousands of years with a mostly independent history from the people of India.
Even the name India has it's origins in Pakistan not vice versa. From Sapta Sindhu (land of the rivers) came Indu. From Indu came Indus. From Indus came India.

A last few notes are to be added to this post. Though Lashkari is not derived from Parsi, it is still a close relative of that language as people understand. But that relationship has been confused.
Urdu and Farsi are both derived from Proto-Indo-Iranic, making Lashkari a close relative of Parsi and not an "offspring" of it. Refer to the chart posted below:

Also what many people who ignorantly claim Parsi to be a "parent" of Lashkari don't realize that despite it's close common origin with Parsi, the language does not have grammatical gender distinction.

Lashkari has grammatical gender mainly in verbs, tenses, possessive pronouns and less often in adjectives. Some words for animals are gender based and verbs/tenses applied to objects are also gender based depending on the sound of the object, usually "aa" for masculine and "ee" for feminine.
If an object has a gender neutral sound, then the masculine verb form is usually applied. The same is true for plural form unless the entire plural collective nouns are feminine.

In English grammatical gender is found mainly in personal pronouns and possessive pronouns. In English an example of grammatical gender would be the phrase "he does go" or "she does go."
Grammatical gender is shown in the personal pronoun; whereas the same phrase in Lashkari shows the present indefinite tense having the grammatical gender as "wo jata hai" for male and "wo jati hai" for female.

Parsi has no form of grammatical gender wheather in verbs, tenses, adjectives or any pronouns.

Though the Nostratic theory states that Altaic, Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic might be related, it still would not make Lashkari an 'offspring' of Arabic and the Turkic languages, but rather having a common origin and being a very distant relative of them. If a common Nostratic origin is found, it may have been with a Nostratic language spoken perhaps well over 10,000 years ago.

A small basic chart of the proposed Nostratic family:


A more detailed chart of the proposed family though the placement, inclusion and arrangement of the languages is disputed by some linguists and anthropologists: