When people hear or read the word “Aryan”, they probably think about Nazism, a fascist ideology that defends the supremacism of a “superior German race”, which led to the torture, dehumanization, and death of Europe’s Jewish, Romani and other racialized people, LGBTQ+, and people with disabilities.

Aryan (ārya आर्य) is a Classical Sanskrit term which means “one who does noble deeds; a noble one” (WIKIPEDIA, 2020) it was also used to refer to the Indo-European language branch spoken in Iran and India (ALGEO, 2009, p. 51). However, in XIX, some Philologists referred to the Indo-European Family as “Aryan”. In 1861, Max Muller, a German Scholar of Comparative language, religion, and mythology, was the first writer to mention the existence of an “Aryan Race” (DAVID and NICHOLLS, 2016, p. 96).  In 1926, Gordon Childe, Australian Archeologist, specialist in European Prehistory, published a book called The Aryans, which was full of archeological and linguistic arguments in an attempt to establish the supposed homeland of the Indo-European Family.

According to Colin Refrew, a British Archeologist and Paleologist, the discussion about a homeland it wasn't purely academic, once the “German Scholars preferred and Indo-European homeland in Northern Europe”. The “Aryan race” Theory then became more and more popular in Germany. While some authors opposed to it, other writers argued that the Aryans were a biologically superior group of humans, based on it's Nordic Traces, while the Semitic were considered an “inferior race”. Muller was deeply saddened that his studies were used to justify and reinforce a false ethnic superiority based on nordic traces. In 1888, he wrote that "an ethnologist who speaks of the Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary, or a brachycephalic grammar".

Since this term was appropriated by the Nazis, Linguists substituted “Aryan” to “Indo-European”, a term without a racist connotation, that refers “only to the culture of a group of people who lived in a relatively small area in early times and who spoke a more or less unified language out of which many languages have developed over thousands of years.” (ALGEO, 2009, p. 52). The Academic words, must always be free of prejudice and a sense of superiority, in language and race.

"Indo-European is a matter of culture, not of genes."
— John Algeo