Definition of Iranian languages

This article deals with the language family. For languages spoken on the territory of Iran, see Languages of Iran.

The Iranian languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family. With the Indo-Aryan languages they form the Indo-Iranian languages group. Avestan and Old Persian are the oldest recorded Iranian languages.

Today, there are an estimated 150-200 million native speakers of Iranian languages. The 2005 SIL enumerates 87 varieties of Iranian languages, per number of native speakers, the greatest are Persian (ca. 70 million), Pashto (ca. 40 million), Kurdish (25 million) and Balochi (ca. 7 million); to compare these numbers against those for other languages, see list of languages by number of native speakers.