The Indo-Aryan (or Indic) languages are the dominant language family of the Indian subcontinent, spoken largely by Indo-Aryan people. 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 (approx 1.5 of 3 billion), and more than half of all Indo-European languages recognized by Ethnologue. The largest in terms of native speakers are Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu, about 240 million), Bengali (about 230 million), Punjabi (about 110 million), Marathi (about 70 million), Gujarati (about 45 million), Bhojpuri (about 40 million), Oriya (about 30 million), Sindhi (about 20 million), Sinhala (about 16 million), Nepali (about 14 million), and Assamese (about 13 million), with a total number of native speakers of more than 900 million.
