Indo Aryan languages are one of the major language families in the world. They are rooted in the ancient Sanskrit language and utilize the Devanagari script. This family form a subgroup of the Indo Iranian languages which belong to the Indo-European family of languages.

According to a research done in 2005, there are 209 varieties of Indo Aryan languages. The largest spoken languages in this group are Hindustani, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Nepali, Oriya, and Sindhi with 900 million native speakers. The earliest evidence of the Indo Aryan language is found in the Vedic Sanskrit, the language used in the ancient texts of India. In the 7th century to the 5th century the Sanskrit language was codified and standardized by the well-known grammarian Panini. In course of time, Prakrits replaced Sanskrit. With the passage of time, somewhere in the medieval period Prakrits was divided into many branches with Middle Indic dialects. `Apabhramsa` was the term that was coined for transitional dialects connecting Middle Indic with early Modern Indic, starting from the 6th to the 13th centuries. The languages that were formed from Apabhransa were Bengali and Hindi. Other languages, which are a part of this category, are Gujarati, Oriya, Marathi and Punjabi.

A major breakthrough came with the Muslim invasion in India. With the Mughal rule in India, Persian became a very important language in the Islamic courts. However Urdu replaced Persian. Urdu was the amalgamation of Persian and Arabic with the grammar of the local dialects.

The main form of language in the Hindi speaking areas was Braj- Bhasha whose traces can still be found today. However in the 19th century, Braj-Bhasa was replaced by the Khari Boli dialect. In the mid 20th century when India attained independence, Hindustani, which is a combination of Urdu and Hindi, was replaced by Hindi itself. The modern Hindi vocabulary, which is derived from Perso- Arabic, became the official language of India.

However, in the present times, there is a continuation of Hindi-Urdu, with heavily Persianised Urdu and Sanskritised Hindi with the rules of grammar remaining the same. The people speak some where in between i.e. Hindustani.