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Hypothetical subfamily of the Indo European languages

Graeco Aryan, or Graeco Armeno Aryan, is a hypothetical clade within the Indo European family that would be the ancestor of Hellenic, Armenian, and the Indo Iranian languages, which spans Southern Europe, Armenian highlands and Southern Asian regions of Eurasia. The Graeco Armeno Aryan group supposedly branched off from the parent Indo European stem by the mid 3rd millennium BC.

In the context of the Kurgan hypothesis, Graeco Aryan is also known as "Late Proto Indo European" or "Late Indo European" to suggest that Graeco Aryan forms a dialect group, which corresponds to the latest stage of linguistic unity in the Indo European homeland in the early part of the 3rd millennium BC. By 2500 BC, Proto Greek and Proto Indo Iranian had separated and moved respectively westward and eastward from the Pontic Steppe. If Graeco Aryan is a valid group, Grassmann's law may have a common origin in Greek and Sanskrit. However, Grassmann's law in Greek postdates certain sound changes that happened only in Greek, not Sanskrit, which suggests that it could not have been inherited directly from a common Graeco Aryan stage. Rather, it is more likely that an areal feature spread across a then contiguous Graeco Aryan–speaking area. That would have occurred after early stages of Proto Greek and Proto Indo Iranian had developed into separate dialects but before they ceased to be in geographic contact.

Evidence for the existence of a Graeco Aryan subclade was given by Wolfram Euler's 1979 examination on shared features in Greek and Sanskrit nominal inflection. Graeco Aryan is invoked in particular in studies of comparative mythology such as Martin Litchfield West (1999) and Calvert Watkins (2001). One controversial hypothesis has placed Greek in a Graeco Armenian subclade of Indo European, though some researchers have integrated both attempts by including also Armenian in a putative Graeco Armeno Aryan language family, further divided between Proto Greek (possibly united with Phrygian) and thus arriving at an Armeno Aryan subclade, the putative ancestor of Armenian and Indo Iranian. Graeco Aryan has comparatively wide support among Indo Europeanists who support the Armenian hypothesis, which asserts that the homeland of the Indo European language family was in the Armenian Highlands.