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Which countries have large populations of Indo-Aryan language speakers?
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Indo-Aryan languages
Devanagari script from a section of the Sanskrit Bhagavata Purana, c. 1880–c. 1900; in the British Library.
Indo-Aryan languages are primarily spoken by more than 800 million people across South Asia. The countries with the largest populations of Indo-Aryan language speakers include:1
- India: Home to a vast array of New Indo-Aryan languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, and Punjabi.2
- Bangladesh: Bengali serves as the official language, with over 100 million native speakers.2
- Pakistan: Urdu is the official language and is spoken by most of the population as a first or second language.2
- Nepal: Nepali is the official language, with approximately 11.1 million speakers.2
- Sri Lanka: Sinhala is an official language, spoken by approximately 13.5 million people.213
These nations represent the primary geographic concentration of the Indo-Aryan subgroup of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family.1