Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you saying that every speaker of an Indo-Aryan language can understand every other speaker of an Indo-Aryan language?
Can someone with more linguistic background compare this to Roman languages for me. Is this like saying Italian, French, Spanish are pretty much the same because they are Romamtic languages? Or English and German are interchangable, because English is a Germanic language? Or, is much closer like British and American English- just mostly difference because of accents and dialects? Trying to understand how different In…
It really varies. Some languages, like Hindi, Gujarati, and Punjabi, are about as similar as Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. In other cases the common languages can be very different. Telugu and Tamil, for instance, are probably much more like trying to go between English and German. Telugu and Kannada are kind of odd ducks. They're basically Dravidian languages that borrowed tons of their vocabulary from an Indo-European language (Sanskrit). That actually makes it a very good analogue for English, which is a Germanic language that spent a lot of time trying desperately to be a Romance language (French).