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224 There are several other language, in regions bordering on or included within the Iranian territory, which stand in such relations with those we have been describing as to be ranked in the same class, although their Iranian attributes are greatly obscured by the changes which have passed upon them since their separation from the principal stock. By far the most important of these is the Armenian, with an abundant literature going back to the fifth century, the era of the Christianization of the Armenian people. Others are the Ossetic, in the Caucasus; the Kurdish, the dialect of the wild mountaineers of the border lands between Persia, Turkey, and Russia; and the Afghan or Pushto, which in very recent times has enjoyed a certain degree of literary cultivation.

We come, finally, to that member of our family which has lived its life within the borders of India. Not all the numerous dialects which fill this immense peninsula, between the impassable wall of the Himalayas and the Indian ocean, own kindred with the Indo-European tongues, but only those of its northern portion, of Hindustan proper, ranging from the Indus to the mouths of the Ganges, together with a certain extent of the sea-coast and its neighbourhood stretching southward on either side. The central mountainous region and the table-lands of the Dekhan yet belong to the aboriginal tribes, who in the north were crowded out or subjugated, at a period lying only just beyond the ken of recorded history, by the Indo-European races, as they intruded themselves through the avenue, the passes on the north-western frontier, by which the conquerors of India have in all ages found entrance. The principal modern dialects of our kindred are the Hindi, Bengali, and Mahratta, each with various subdivisions, and each with a literature of its own, running back only a few centuries. The Hindustani, or Urdu, is a form of the Hindi which grew up in the camps (ûrdû) of the Mohammedan conquerors of India, since the eleventh century, as medium of communication between them and the subject population of central Hindustan, more corrupted in form, and filled with Persian and Arabic words—being thus, as it were, the English of India: it has enjoyed more literary cultivation than any other of the recent dialects,