Northwestern Indo-Aryan languages

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 Hindusthani (Hindi 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.