Scenario of language replacement

[Arun Gupta]

In Frontline, Professor Asko Parpola gives mentions two historical cases of
how the language of a minority displaced a majority.  Supposedly these
parallel what happened in ancient India with the incursion of the
Indo-Aryans.

The two examples given are the British in India, and the displacement of the
native languages in South America.  Neither case parallels what may have
happened in ancient India because the technological gap between ingressor
and resident was much more significant in these two examples; the ingressor
remained vitally connected to a flourishing and
technologically-rapidly-advancing external culture in these two examples,
and in the case of South America, the native population was decimated by
diseases new to them that came from Europe.  In the case of India, English
was spoken by around 10% of the population when the British left.  If
English has not faded away in India, it is because of the external dominance
of the United States, and because English is associated with technological
advancement.

None of these factors applies to the hypothesized language replacement that
took place in ancient India.

-Arun Gupta