Ario es una palabra derivada del sánscrito ārya. El avéstico cognado del término sánscrito es airya y el equivalente en persa antiguo es ariya. Se ha sostenido ampliamente que el término fue usado como una autodesignación étnica de los protoindoiranios. Desde el siglo XIX, se tomó el término protoindoiranio para referirse no solo a los indoiranios propiamente dichos, sino también a los hablantes de protoindoeuropeo como un conjunto.

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"Aryan" (/ˈɛəriən, ˈɛərjən, ˈær-/) is a term meaning "noble" which was used as a self-designation by Indo-Iranian people. The word was used by the Indic people of the Vedic period in India as an ethnic label for themselves, as well as to refer to the noble class and geographic location known as Āryāvarta where Indo-Aryan culture was based. The closely related Iranian people also used the term as an ethnic label for themselves in the Avesta scriptures, and the word forms the etymological source of the country Iran. It was believed in the 19th century that it was also a self-designation used by all Proto-Indo-Europeans, a theory that has now been abandoned. Scholars point out that, even in ancient times, the idea of being an "Aryan" was religious, cultural and linguistic, not racial. Drawing on misinterpreted references in the Rig Veda by Western scholars in the 19th century, the term "Aryan" was adopted as a racial category through the work of Arthur de Gobineau, whose ideology of race was based on an idea of blonde northern European "Aryans" who had migrated across the world and founded all major civilizations, before being degraded through racial mixture with local populations. Through Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Gobineau's ideas later influenced the Nazi racial ideology, which also saw "Aryan peoples" as innately superior to other putative racial groups. The atrocities committed in the name of this racial aryanism caused the term to be abandoned by most academics; and, in present-day academia, the term "Aryan" has been replaced in most cases by the terms "Indo-Iranian" and "Indo-European", and "Aryan" is now mostly limited to its appearance in the term of the "Indo-Aryan languages".

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