Dialect Continuum - Indic Dialect Continuum

Indic Dialect Continuum

Many of the Indo-Aryan languages of Northern India (that includes Assam Valley as for the language Assamese) and Pakistan form a dialect continuum. What is called "Hindi" in India is frequently Standard Hindi, the Sanskritized version of the colloquial Hindustani spoken in the Delhi area since the Mughals. However, the term Hindi is also used for most of the central Indic dialects from Bihar to Rajasthan, and more widely some of the Eastern and Northern dialects too. The Indo-Aryan prakrits also gave rise to languages like Gujarati, Assamese, Maithili, Bengali, Oriya, Nepali, Marathi, and Punjabi, which are not considered to be Hindi despite being part of the same dialect continuum.

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