IndoArian

Indo-Aryan, sometimes written Indo-Arian, is a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising languages spoken primarily in the Indian subcontinent. It includes most of the languages of northern, western, and eastern South Asia, such as Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Assamese, Odia, Sindhi, Nepali, Sinhala, Maithili, and Bhojpuri.

Indo-Aryan descends from Proto-Indo-Aryan, itself a descendant of Proto-Indo-Iranian. The earliest attested Indo-Aryan language is Vedic Sanskrit from the early first millennium BCE. Old Indo-Aryan documents early Indian linguistic traditions; Middle Indo-Aryan includes Prakrit and Pali; modern varieties emerged from roughly the second millennium CE onward, shaped by literary standardization, administration, and widespread contact.

Geographically, Indo-Aryan languages are spread across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, with communities in diaspora settings. Several serve as official languages or linguae francae in their regions, such as Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, and Urdu. They form several intelligibility groups, with Hindi-Urdu representing a particularly influential shared standard in northern India and Pakistan.

Linguistic features commonly associated with Indo-Aryan languages include subject–object–verb word order, postpositions, and rich inflection for gender, number, tense, and case. They retain a large inventory of consonant phonemes, including retroflex sounds, and exhibit extensive borrowing from Persian, Arabic, and, in some periods, European languages. Writing systems are diverse, including Devanagari, Bengali script, Gurmukhi, Gujarati script, and others.

In scholarly contexts, Indo-Aryan is the standard term; Indo-Arian is a less common variant. The term Aryan has historical and political sensitivities, but in linguistic usage it denotes genealogical relationships rather than ethnicity.