Indo-Aryan languages
Native speakers of the Indo-Aryan languages are known as the Indo-Aryan peoples. The Indo-Aryan languages belong to the Indo-European language family and are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages. They have more over 800 million speakers as of the beginning of the 21st century, the most majority of whom live in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. In addition, apart from the Indian subcontinent, large communities of Indo-Aryan-speaking immigrants and expatriates live in Northwestern Europe, Western Asia, North America, the Caribbean, Southeast Africa, Polynesia, and Australia. In addition, there are several million speakers of Romani languages, the majority of whom are concentrated in Southeastern Europe. There are around 200 Indo-Aryan languages that are now recognised.
Old Indo-Aryan languages, such as early Vedic Sanskrit, are the ancestors of modern Indo-Aryan languages, which descended from them through Middle Indo-Aryan languages (or Prakrits). The languages with the highest number of native speakers are Hindi–Urdu (approximately 329 million), Bengali (242 million), Punjabi (approximately 120 million), Marathi (about 112 million), Gujarati (60 million), Rajasthani (58 million), Bhojpuri (51 million), Odia (35 million), Maithili (approximately 34 million), Sindhi (25 million), Nepali (16 million), Assamese (15 According to one statistic from 2005, the total number of native speakers of Indo-Aryan languages was estimated to be close to 900 million individuals.
It is generally accepted that the Indo-Aryan language family as a whole is representative of a continuum of dialects, in which languages often shift into nearby varieties. As a consequence of this, the distinction between languages and dialects is, in many instances, fairly open to interpretation. There are various transitional locations that, depending on categorization, are allocated to different branches of the Indo-Aryan language family. As a result, the classification of the Indo-Aryan languages is very contentious. There are worries that a tree model cannot adequately explain the emergence of New Indo-Aryan; hence, some academics have proposed the wave model as a possible alternative.