Sorry, need to put that term on my black^W forbid list. Used it completely unconsciously.

I'm curious where you learned the term. It's not a term most people know these days.

I only know it from studying about how the Nazis appropriated and twisted the legitimate field of historical linguistics to support their objectives.

I've only heard it used to describe that ideology, or sadly, by acquaintances who subscribed to portions of that ideology.

I don't know for sure. I am pretty sure I did not learn it in school. I read German press daily from the 1970s to the 1990s, less frequently thereafter. So I guess that's the origin. I have never been interested in linguistics as a science. I speak 4 foreign languages, so I have some experience in comparing languages.

A sibling comment says that indo-germanic remains a standard scientific term in German, there is no nationalist background. I cannot comment on the correctness of that claim, but it would explain why I used it. German press is not suspect of nationalism, quite the opposite. (There are of course exceptions, but I have never read those. I am part of the pre 1990 generation that feels uncomfortable when seeing German flags flown by individuals in public.)

> A sibling comment says that indo-germanic remains a standard scientific term in German, there is no nationalist background.

I replied to the sibling about why I think the English word has strong nationalist connections.

I don't know about its German equivalent (Wiktionary claims it's a synonym for Indo-European), but this discussion thread is in English, and furthermore concerns linguistics, and it that context, it has nationalistic connections.

Even the Internet thinks so: the second link on google when you search for the term is a Wikipedia article about the nationalist myth it represents. What appears when you search for it in German?

I understand you didn't use it nationalistically, of course. Sometimes things good and bad are both lost and gained in translation.

> What appears when you search for it in German?

If you search for "indogermanisch" you're going to get the Wikipedia article canonically named "indogermanische Sprachen" first. The second result I see is the English Wikipedia article called "Indo-European languages" and the rest of the articles also appear to be very scientific.

Maybe the term has some weird connotations in English, but that's certainly not true everywhere and it's also not necessarily true in linguistic discourse because English only became relevant as a scientific language relatively recently (German and French used to be much more common) and there's still to this date a lot of linguistic research being published in languages other than English (e.g. why would somebody who researches the German language publish in English?).

> Maybe the term has some weird connotations in English, but that's certainly not true everywhere and it's also not necessarily true in linguistic discourse because English only became relevant as a scientific language relatively recently (German and French used to be much more common).

This discussion is in English though, not German or French.

Historically, the term Indo-Germanic was used first, and it's still used prominently used e.g. in German.

From Wikipedia :

> Thomas Young first used the term Indo-European in 1813, deriving it from the geographical extremes of the language family: from Western Europe to North India.[10][11] A synonym is Indo-Germanic (Idg. or IdG.), specifying the family's southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches. This first appeared in French (indo-germanique) in 1810 in the work of Conrad Malte-Brun; in most languages this term is now dated or less common than Indo-European, although in German indogermanisch remains the standard scientific term.

I have no problem saying that Indo-European is a preferable term nowadays, but to claim that the term "indo-germanic" is ethno-nationalist is just absurd. Using two extreme branches of a family to describe the family is a very common practice in linguistics.

> I have no problem saying that Indo-European is a preferable term nowadays, but to claim that the term "indo-germanic" is ethno-nationalist is just absurd.

It's not absurd because it was used ethno-nationalistically, by both Indians and Germans in the past. I've certainly heard it used in English exactly that way. In English, and especially in linguistics contexts, its nationalist associations are clear.

Furthermore, it's also patently incorrect: there is no higher affinity between the Indic and Germanic branches of Indo-European.

"Indo-European" is a term derived from the geographic span of the language family, not a particular language at either end (there is no "Indian" or "European" language). In contrast, the latter half of Indo-Germanic specifically refers to the Germanic sub-branch, to the exclusion of the many other Indo European sub-branches.

The fabrication of that supposed affinity to the exclusion of the other branches was a specifically nationalist exercise, different only in degree to more egregious things like the appropriation of the swastika (whose name and most prominent use is Indic). We know this because the Indo-European family was uncovered by William Jones when he observed the affinities of Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, not the Germanic languages (those connections then quickly followed). So its identity was always broader than Germanic from the moment of its discovery.

Therefore, Indo-Germanic doesn't make sense for the same reason Indo-Hellenic or Indo-Celtic don't make sense.

The oldest sub-branch affinity we can deduce in the Indo-European language family is the centum/satem split, which Indic and Germanic languages are on opposite sides of, and even that split is difficult to track down to single branch point, it could be an independent development in different sub-branches.

If it had been initially called Indo-Celtic or Indo-Romance and those names had stuck, it would be equally fine, but that's not what happened historically.

You're fighting against windmills, there are no perfect names for huge language families, this gets even worse when we look at certain language families in other continents. It's very common to just pick two subbranches (or geographic regions), combine them and call it a day (e.g. Sino-Tibetan).

> If it had been initially called Indo-Celtic or Indo-Romance and those names had stuck, it would be equally fine, but that's not what happened historically.

Yes, and in English, the language of this discussion, Indo-European is the term that is used, not Indo-Germanic.