Indic

Indic is an adjective referring to the Indian subcontinent and its languages, cultures, and peoples. In linguistics, Indic or Indo-Aryan refers to a major branch of the Indo-Iranian languages within the larger Indo-European family. The Indic languages are descended from earlier Indo-Aryan languages that evolved from Sanskrit and Prakrits and are spoken across much of South Asia, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

Classification and scope: The Indic languages form a primary subgroup of the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European. They are primarily the languages of the northern, western, eastern, and central portions of the subcontinent, with hundreds of millions of native speakers. Prominent languages include Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Odia, Assamese, Sindhi, Konkani, and others.

Indic scripts: The term Indic also denotes the family of Brahmic scripts used to write most Indic languages. These are abugidas descended from the ancient Brahmi script, characterized by consonant–vowel letter forms and diacritic marks for vowels. They are used across the subcontinent and parts of Southeast Asia. Major scripts include Devanagari (for Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit), Bengali-Assamese, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Odia, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, and Sinhala in Sri Lanka.

Usage and scope: Scholarly usage of "Indic" is primarily linguistic and cultural. The term is used to describe linguistic groups, literatures, and scripts of the Indian subcontinent, though it is not a single ethnic or political category and conventions can vary among scholars.