Abstract: This chapter deals with the linguistic evidence from outside of India, particularly loanwords from the Finno-Ugric languages (which have been identified either as Indo-Iranian, Iranian, or Indo-Aryan) as well as the Mitanni and Avestan evidence, all of which have a direct bearing on the problem. Here, too, Indigenists have their own way of accounting for the evidence. The first section of the chapter looks at Semitic loans in Indo-European (Nichol’s model), Finno-Ugric, and other traces of Indo-Aryan (in the Caucasian and Ketic languages, on the borders of China and Korea, in the Kuban region north of the Black Sea, around the Caspian Sea, in Europe, in Afghanistan, and the Middle East). It then examines whether the Avesta (the body of texts preserving the ancient canon of the Iranian Zarathustran tradition) and the Mitanni (a kingdom in north Mesopotamia in the fourteenth century B.C.E.) treaties can throw any light on the Indo-Iranian homeland.

Keywords: Avesta, Finno-Ugric languages, indigenous Aryanism, Indo-Aryan origins, Indo-European, linguistic evidence, linguistics, loanwords, Mitanni treaties,