Nepali

Nepali ( नेपाली )
Spoken in	Nepal , India , Bhutan
speaker	15 million
Linguistic ; classification	Indo-European languages Indo-Iranian languages Indo-Aryan languages Nepali ;
Official status
Official language in	Nepal ; India (State of Sikkim )
Language codes
ISO 639 -1	no
ISO 639 -2	nep
ISO 639-3	nep

Nepali ( नेपाली Nepali [ Nepali ], even Nepali or Nepali ) is a language from the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages . Nepali is the most widely spoken language in Nepal and is the official language there. In addition, it is spoken in northeast India and Bhutan .

According to the 2011 Nepalese census, 11.8 million people in Nepal (45 percent of the total population) speak Nepali as their mother tongue. This makes Nepali by far the largest language in Nepal. It serves as the sole official language and lingua franca for communication between speakers of different languages. According to the 2011 Indian census, a further 2.9 million native Nepali speakers live in India, especially in the northeast of the country . The largest groups of Nepali speakers live in the states of West Bengal ( above all Darjeeling district ), Assam and Sikkim . Nepali is the official language in Sikkim State and Darjeeling District. In addition, it is recognized as one of 22 constitutional languages in India at the supraregional level . No reliable figures are available on the number of Nepali speakers in Bhutan. The proportion of ethnic Nepalese in the total population of Bhutan is estimated at around a third of the total population (approx. 250,000 people). In addition, there is a larger number of Nepali speakers among the Nepalese diaspora and others. A. in the Gulf States and in Southeast Asia .

Nepali is written in the Devanagari script, which is also used for other Indo-Aryan languages, for example Hindi .