[1] Ethnolinguistically, northern South Asia is predominantly Indo-Aryan,[2][3] along with Iranic populations in Afghanistan and Balochistan, and diverse linguistic communities near the Himalayas.

[1] The sixteen "mahajanapada" dynasties flourished in Northern South Asia starting in the sixth century BC, and the region was known as Aryavarta.

This was then replaced by a number of competing polities that fought over territory until the development of robust states starting in the fourth century AD.

[13] From the tenth century CE until about the eighteenth, it was invaded and ruled by Muslims from Afghanistan, Persia and Central Asia.

[14][15] After the 1947 partition, religious nationalism led to a starker divide between Hindi and Urdu, which were respectively modified to have a greater share of their vocabularies come from Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic sources.