[7] Rather than close linguistic or ethnic relationships, the original term Dardic was a geographical concept, denoting the northwesternmost group of Indo-Aryan languages.

Leitner's Dardistan, in its broadest sense, became the basis for the classification of the languages in the north-west of the Indo-Aryan linguistic area (which includes present-day eastern Afghanistan, northern Pakistan, and Kashmir).

[17] George Abraham Grierson, with scant data, borrowed the term and proposed an independent Dardic family within the Indo-Iranian languages.

These features include three sibilants, several types of clusters of consonants, and archaic or antiquated vocabulary lost in other modern Indo-Aryan languages.

[24] French Indologist Gérard Fussman points out that the term Dardic is geographic, not a linguistic expression.

[26] As such, the historic Dardic's position as a legitimate genetic subfamily has been repeatedly called into question; it is widely acknowledged that the grouping is more geographical in nature, as opposed to linguistic.

[35][36] Some linguists have posited that Dardic lects may have originally been spoken throughout a much larger region, stretching from the mouth of the Indus (in Sindh) northwards in an arc, and then eastwards through modern day Himachal Pradesh to Kumaon.

[40] Both ancient and modern Dardic languages demonstrate a marked tendency towards metathesis where a "pre- or postconsonantal 'r' is shifted forward to a preceding syllable".

Examples include a tendency to spell the Classical Sanskrit words priyadarshi (one of the titles of Emperor Ashoka) as instead priyadrashi and dharma as dhrama.

Kashmiri, for instance, has a marked tendency to shift k to ch and j to z (e.g. zon 'person' is cognate to Sanskrit jan 'person or living being' and Persian jān 'life').