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Comment by sajithdilshan | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, northern India and southern Sri Lanka ended up with Indo-European languages. However, southern Indian and northern Sri Lanka ended up speaking a completely different language family. I wonder how that happened.

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The Indo-European speakers invaded from the north.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_migrations

That doesn't explain Sri Lanka which is past South India...

Edit: The actual answer is North/Eastern Indians speaking an IE variant immigrated to Sri Lanka in the 5th/6th centuries and became the dominant language there since (Sinhala)

Could it be that Sri lanka is an island

Sri Lanka's been inhabited for over 100k years.

Sri Lanka only became an island like 500 years ago. It was a storm in 1480 that disconnected the passable land bridge that once connected it to mainland India.

There is a difference between invasion and migration though, AIT has long been debunked, the current consensus is AMT

There are many historical events of Indo-European speakers invading India from the north, like Darius the Great, Alexander the Great, the Mughals. AIT refers to a theory from an earlier time period but rejecting it does not rule out subsequent Indo-European conquests of the region which surely contributed to the spread of Indo-European culture and language southward.

But the advent of Indo-European languages in Northern India (let alone Southern Sri Lanka) has nothing to do with Alexander or the Mughals.

The Aryan Invasion Theory was propagated by the British to justify their colonial brutality, and no self-respecting historian will now call the gradual Aryan migration an invasion. The only people who still do are usually trying to achieve some political aims, usually imperial apologia.

Why are you being down voted... By the time alexander showed up India had spoken an indo European language for thousands of years.

People don't like getting their dogmas challenged, especially when it comes to their Fathers' sins.

His first sentence is reasonable. The rest of the comment is unhinged.

> The theory of an immigration of IA speaking Arya ("Aryan invasion") is simply seen as a means of British policy to justify their own intrusion into India and their subsequent colonial rule: in both cases, a "white race" was seen as subduing the local darker colored population.

Source: Edwin Bryant in https://archive.org/details/EdwinBryantLauriePattonIndoAryan...

the story of how the sinhalese got there is told in the Mahavamsa a Buddhist pali take that recounts the story of prince Vijaya fleeing his kingdom in mainland India and arriving in sri lanka.

The northern folks, the tamils are there because sri lanka used to be physically connected to Tamil nadu in recent history, like just a few centuries ago

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