Languages of South Asia

The languages of South Asia include a few major language families:
South Asia includes India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives, and sometimes Afghanistan.
Indo-Aryan languages.
Most Indo-Aryan languages grew from Sanskrit, an ancient language. It is hard to decide to define what is a language, and what is just a dialect (language variant). For example, Hindi and Urdu are similar when spoken, but Hindi is written in the Devanagari script and Urdu is written in the Persian-Arabic script. Hindi uses more words from Sanskrit, while Urdu uses more words from Persian and Arabic.
Iranic languages.
Only some of the Iranic languages are from South Asia. Others are from West Asia or Central Asia. This table shows the total number of people who speak each language.
Nuristani languages.
About 130,000 people speak the five Nuristani languages.
Tibeto-Burman languages.
A number of Tibeto-Burman languages are spoken in Nepal, Bhutan, Northeast India, Bangladesh, North India, and North Pakistan.
Austroasiatic languages.
Most Austroasiatic languages are spoken in Southeast Asia, rather than South Asia. The Austronesian languages spoken in South Asia are part of the Munda and Khasic branches.
Kra-Dai languages.
Most Kra-Dai languages are spoken in East Asia and Southeast Asia. About 10,000 people speak these languages in South Asia, in Assam and the surrounding area.
Language isolates.
A language isolate is a language that is not known to be related to any other languages.
There are several native languages to the Andaman Islands. Originally they were grouped into Great Andamanese, Ongan, Jangil, and Sentinelese. Today, people have stopped speaking some of these languages, making them extinct.
The Burushaski language is spoken by about 100,000 people in North Pakistan. The Kusunda language is spoken by less than 100 people in Nepal. The Nihali language is spoken by 2,000 or so people in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. All of these are considered language isolates.