North-Western Zone

Indo-Aryan
Indic
Geographic distribution	South Asia
Linguistic classification	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan
Proto-language	Proto-Indo-Aryan
Subdivisions	Dardic Northern Zone Northwestern Zone Western Zone Central Zone Eastern Zone Southern Zone (the NW, W, C, and E zones all include languages traditionally counted as dialects of Hindi)
ISO 639-5
Linguasphere	59= (phylozone)
Glottolog	indo1321
1978 map showing Geographical distribution of the major Indo-Aryan languages. (Urdu is included under Hindi. Romani, Domari, and Lomavren are outside the scope of the map.) Dotted/striped areas indicate where multilingualism is common.   Central   Dardic   Eastern   Northern   Northwestern   Southern   Western

The Indo-Aryan or Indic languages are the dominant language family of the Indian subcontinent. They constitute a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, itself a branch of the Indo-European language family. Indo-Aryan speakers form about one half of all Indo-European speakers (about 1.5 of 3 billion), and more than half of all Indo-European languages recognized by Ethnologue. While the languages are primarily spoken in South Asia, pockets of Indo-Aryan languages are found to be spoken in Europe and the Middle East.

The largest in terms of native speakers are Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu, about 329 million),Bengali (242 million),Punjabi (about 100 million), and other languages, with a 2005 estimate placing the total number of native speakers at nearly 900 million.

Proto-Indo-Aryan, or sometimes Proto-Indic, is the reconstructed proto-language of the Indo-Aryan languages. It is intended to reconstruct the language of the Proto-Indo-Aryans. Proto-Indo-Aryan is meant to be the predecessor of Old Indo-Aryan (1500–300 BCE) which is directly attested as Vedic and Mitanni-Aryan. Despite the great archaicity of Vedic, however, the other Indo-Aryan languages preserve a small number of archaic features lost in Vedic.

The earliest evidence of the group is from Vedic and Mitanni-Aryan. Vedic has been used in the ancient preserved religious hymns, the foundational canon of Hinduism known as the Vedas. Mitanni-Aryan is of similar age to the language of the Rigveda, but the only evidence of it is a few proper names and specialized loanwords. The language of the Vedas – commonly referred to as "Vedic Sanskrit" by modern scholars – is only marginally different from Proto-Indo-Aryan the proto-language of the Indo-Aryan languages.