Indo-Aryan languages
The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages[a]) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily concentrated in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Maldives and Nepal .[1] Moreover, apart from the Indian subcontinent, large immigrant and expatriate Indo-Aryan–speaking communities live in Northwestern Europe, Western Asia, North America, the Caribbean, Southeast Africa, Polynesia and Australia, along with several million speakers of Romani languages primarily concentrated in Southeastern Europe. There are over 200 known Indo-Aryan languages.[5]
Indo-Aryan
- Indo-Iranian
- Indo-Aryan
59= (phylozone)
Modern Indo-Aryan languages descend from Old Indo-Aryan languages such as early Vedic Sanskrit, through Middle Indo-Aryan languages (or Prakrits).[6][7][8][9] The largest such languages in terms of first-speakers are Hindi–Urdu (c. 330 million),[10] Bengali (242 million),[11] Punjabi (about 120 million),[12] Marathi (112 million), and Gujarati (60 million). A 2005 estimate placed the total number of native speakers of the Indo-Aryan languages at nearly 900 million people.[13] Other estimates are higher suggesting a figure of 1.5 billion speakers of Indo-Aryan languages.[2]
Sociolinguistics[edit]
Register[edit]
In many Indo-Aryan languages, the literary register is often more archaic and utilises a different lexicon (Sanskrit or Perso-Arabic) than spoken vernacular. One example is Bengali's high literary form, Sādhū bhāṣā, as opposed to the more modern Calita bhāṣā (Cholito-bhasha).[54] This distinction approaches diglossia.
Language and dialect[edit]
In the context of South Asia, the choice between the appellations "language" and "dialect" is a difficult one, and any distinction made using these terms is obscured by their ambiguity. In one general colloquial sense, a language is a "developed" dialect: one that is standardised, has a written tradition and enjoys social prestige. As there are degrees of development, the boundary between a language and a dialect thus defined is not clear-cut, and there is a large middle ground where assignment is contestable. There is a second meaning of these terms, in which the distinction is drawn on the basis of linguistic similarity. Though seemingly a "proper" linguistics sense of the terms, it is still problematic: methods that have been proposed for quantifying difference (for example, based on mutual intelligibility) have not been seriously applied in practice; and any relationship established in this framework is relative.[55]