These are mostly located in and around the Cordillera Central of northern Luzon in the Philippines.

Among its major languages are Ilocano, Pangasinan and Ibanag.

Lawrence Reid (2018) divides the over thirty Northern Luzon languages into five branches: the Northeastern Luzon, Cagayan Valley and Meso-Cordilleran subgroups, further Ilokano and Arta as group-level isolate branches.

[1][note 1] Reid (2006) has reconstructed the Proto-Northern Luzon sound system as follows, with phonemic stress:[4] The sound inventory of Proto-Northern Luzon shows no innovations from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian that would set it apart from other Philippine languages.

There are however two phonological innovations that characterize the Northern Luzon languages: Lexical innovations only found in Northern Luzon languages include: *dutdut 'feather, body hair', *kəməl 'squeeze', *lətəg 'swell', *yəgyəg 'earthquake', *takdəg 'stand', *ʔubət 'buttocks'.