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Languages of India
The Languages of India belong to several language families, the major ones being the Indo-Aryan languages
(a subbranch of Indo-European) spoken by 74% of Indians and the Dravidian languages spoken by 23% of Indians.
[1][2]

Other languages spoken in India belong to the Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman, and a few minor language families
and isolates.
[3]

The official language of the Central Government of Republic of India is Standard Hindi, while English is
the secondary official language.
[4]
The constitution of India states that "The official language of the Union shall be Hindi in
Devanagari script."
[5]
Neither the Constitution of India nor Indian law specifies a national language, a position supported
by a High Court ruling.
[6]
However, languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian constitution are sometimes
referred to, without legal standing, as the national languages of India.
[7][8]

Individual mother tongues in India number several hundred;
[9]
the 1961 census recognized 1,652
[10]

(SIL Ethnologue lists 415). According to Census of India of 2001, 30 languages are spoken by more than a million native
speakers, 122 by more than 10,000. Three millennia of language contact has led to significant mutual influence among
the four language families in India and South Asia. Two contact languages have played an important role in the history of
India: Persian and English.
[11]

History
The northern Indian languages from the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family evolved from Old
Indo-Aryan by way of the Middle Indo-Aryan Prakrit languages and Apabhraa of the Middle Ages. There is no
consensus for a specific time where the modern north Indian languages such as Hindi-Urdu, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati,
Marathi, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Sindhi and Oriya emerged, but AD 1000 is commonly accepted.
[12]
Each language had
different influences, with Hindi-Urdu (Hindustani) being strongly influenced by Persian.
The Dravidian languages of South India had a history independent of Sanskrit. The major Dravidian languages are
Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and Tulu.
[13]
Though Malayalam and Telugu are Dravidian in origin, over eighty
percent of their lexicon is borrowed from Sanskrit.
[14][15][16][17]
The Telugu script can reproduce the full range of Sanskrit
phonetics without losing any of the text's originality,
[18]
whereas the Malayalam script includes graphemes capable of
representing all the sounds of Sanskrit and all Dravidian languages.
[19][20]
The Kannada and Tamil languages have lesser
Sanskrit and Prakrit influence.
[citation needed]
The Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman languages of North-East India also have
long independent histories.
[citation needed]




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Inventories
Dialectologists distinguish the terms "language" and "dialect" on the basis of mutual intelligibility. The Indian
census uses two specific classifications in its own unique way: (1) 'language' and (2) 'mother tongue'. The 'mother tongues'
are grouped within each 'language'. Many 'mother tongues' so defined would be considered a language rather than a dialect
by linguistic standards. This is especially so for many 'mother tongues' with tens of millions of speakers that are officially
grouped under the 'language' Hindi.
The Indian census of 1961 recognised 1,652 different languages in India (including languages not native to the
subcontinent). The 1991 census recognizes 1,576 classified "mother tongues"
[21]
The People of India (POI) project of
Anthropological Survey of India reported 325 languages which are used for in-group communication by the Indian
communities.SIL Ethnologue lists 415 living "Languages of India" (out of 6,912 worldwide).
According to the 1991 census, 22 'languages' had more than a million native speakers, 50 had more than 100,000 and 114
had more than 10,000 native speakers. The remaining accounted for a total of 566,000 native speakers (out of a total of 838
million Indians in 1991).
[21]

According to the most recent census of 2001, 29 'languages' have more than a million native speakers, 60 have
more than 100,000 and 122 have more than 10,000 native speakers.
The government of India has given 22 "languages of the 8th Schedule" the status of official language. The number of
languages given this status has increased through the political process. Some languages with a large number of speakers
still do not have this status, the largest of these being Bhili/Bhiladi with some 9.6 million native speakers (ranked 14th),
followed by Garhwali with 2.9 million speakers, Gondi with 2.7 million speakers (ranked 18th) and Khandeshi with 2.1
million speakers (ranked 22nd). On the other hand, 2 languages with fewer than 2 million native speakers have recently
been included in the 8th Schedule for mostly political reasons: Manipuri/Maithei with 1.5 million speakers (ranked 25th)
and Bodo with 1.4 million speakers (ranked 26th).
Language families
The languages of India belong to several language families. The largest of these in terms of speakers is the Indo-
European family, predominantly represented in its Indo-Aryan branch (accounting for some 700 million speakers, or 69%
of the population), but also including minority languages such as Persian, Portuguese or French, and English as a lingua
franca. Kashmiri and other Dardic languages, which form part of the Indo-Iranian, and arguably Indo-Aryan family, have
some 4.6 million speakers in India.
The second largest language family is the Dravidian family, accounting for some 200 million speakers, or 26%.
Families with smaller numbers of speakers are Austro-Asiatic and numerous small Tibeto-Burman languages, with some
10 and 6 million speakers, respectively, together 5% of the population.
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The Ongan languages of the southern Andaman Islands form a fifth family; the Great Andamanese languages are extinct
apart from one highly endangered language with a dwindling number of speakers. There is also a known language isolate,
the Nihali language. The Shompen language or languages is/are poorly attested and unclassified. Sentinelese is entirely
unknown.
Most languages in the Indian republic are written in Brahmi-derived scripts, such as Devanagari, Kannada, Eastern Nagari -
Assamese/Bengali, Telugu, Oriya, Tamil, etc., though Urdu is written in an Arabic script, and a few minor languages such
as Santali use independent scripts.
Official languages
The official languages of the Republic of India are Standard Hindi (41% of the country speaks Standard Hindi or
another Hindi dialect) and English. According to the article 343 (1) of the Constitution of India, "The Official Language of
the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagari script."
[22]
The individual states can legislate their own official languages,
depending on their linguistic demographics. For example, the state of Maharashtra has Marathi as its sole official language,
the state of Punjab has Punjabi as its sole official language, the state of Andhra Pradesh has Telugu as its sole official
language, the state of Orissa has Oriya as its sole official language, the state of Tamil Nadu has Tamil as its sole official
language, the state of Karnataka has Kannada as its sole official language and the state of Kerala has Malayalam as its sole
official language, while the state of Jammu and Kashmir has Kashmiri, Urdu, and Dogri as its official languages.
Article 345 of the constitution authorizes the several states of India to adopt as "official languages" of that state which
people of that state can then use in all dealings with all branches of the local, state and federal governments either
Standard Hindi or any one or more of the languages spoken in that state. Until the Twenty-First Amendment of the
Constitution in 1967, the country recognised 14 official regional languages. The Eighth Schedule and the Seventy-First
Amendment provided for the inclusion of Sindhi, Konkani, Meiteilon and Nepali, thereby increasing the number of official
regional languages of India to 18. At present there are 22 official languages of India.
[23]
Individual states, whose borders are
mostly drawn on socio-linguistic lines, are free to decide their own language for internal administration and education.
The following table lists the official languages, aside from English, set out in the eighth schedule as of May 2008:
[24]







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Language Family
Speakers
(in millions, 2001)
State(s)
Assamese/Axomiya Indo-Aryan,
Eastern
13 Assam, Arunachal Pradesh
Bengali Indo-Aryan,
Eastern
83 West Bengal, Tripura, Andaman & Nicobar Islands
Bodo Tibeto-Burman 1.4 Assam
Dogri Indo-Aryan,
Northwestern
2.3 Jammu and Kashmir
Gujarati Indo-Aryan,
Western
46 Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu, Gujarat
Hindi Indo-Aryan,
Central
258422
[26]
Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Arunachal Pradesh,
Bihar, Chandigarh, Chhattisgarh, the national capital
territory of Delhi, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh,
Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh
and Uttarakhand
Kannada Dravidian 38 Karnataka
Kashmiri Indo-Aryan,
Dardic
5.5 Jammu and Kashmir
Konkani Indo-Aryan,
Southern
2.57.6
[27]
Goa, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Kerala
Maithili Indo-Aryan,
Eastern
1232
[28]
Bihar
Malayalam Dravidian 33 Kerala, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep,
Puducherry
Manipuri (also Meitei
or Meithei)
Tibeto-Burman 1.5 Manipur
Marathi Indo-Aryan,
Southern
72 Maharashtra, Goa, Dadra & Nagar Haveli, Daman and
Diu, Madhya Pradesh
Nepali Indo-Aryan,
Northern
2.9 Sikkim, West Bengal, Assam
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Oriya Indo-Aryan,
Eastern
33 Orissa
Punjabi Indo-Aryan,
Northwestern
29 Chandigarh, Delhi, Haryana, Punjab
Sanskrit Indo-Aryan 0.01 non-regional
Santhali Munda 6.5 Santhal tribals of the Chota Nagpur Plateau
(comprising the states of Bihar, Chattisgarh,
Jharkhand, Orissa)
Sindhi Indo-Aryan,
Northwestern
2.5 non-regional
Tamil Dravidian 61 Tamil Nadu, Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Puducherry
Telugu Dravidian 74 Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Andhra Pradesh,
Puducherry
Urdu Indo-Aryan,
Central
52 Jammu and Kashmir, Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Bihar,
Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand

Official classical languages
In 2004, the Government of India declared that languages that met certain requirements could be accorded the
status of a "Classical Language in India".
[29]
Languages thus far declared to be Classical are Tamil (in 2004),
[30]
Sanskrit (in
2005),
[31]
Kannada and Telugu (in 2008).
[32]

In 2005, Sanskrit, which already had special status in Article 351 of the Constitution of India as the primary source
language for the development of the official standard of Hindi,
[33]
was also declared to be a classical language; this was
followed by similar declarations for Kannada and Telugu in 2008, based on the recommendation of a committee of
linguistic experts constituted by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India.
[32]

In a 2006 press release, Minister of Tourism & Culture Ambika Soni told the Rajya Sabha the following criteria
were laid down to determine the eligibility of languages to be considered for classification as a "Classical Language",
[34]

High antiquity of its early texts/recorded history over a period of 1500-2000 years; A body of ancient
literature/texts, which is considered a valuable heritage by generations of speakers; The literary tradition be
original and not borrowed from another speech community; The classical language and literature being distinct
from modern, there may also be a discontinuity between the classical language and its later forms or its offshoots.

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Other local languages and dialects
In addition, the 2001 census identified the following mother tongues (i.e. languages and dialects) having more than
one million speakers. All were grouped under Hindi or Oriya.
[35]


Mother tongue No. of speakers
Bhojpuri 33,099,497
Rajasthani 18,355,613
Magadh/Magahi 13,978,565
Chhattisgarhi 13,260,186
Haryanvi 7,997,192
Marwari 7,936,183
Malvi 5,565,167
Mewari 5,091,697
Khorth/Khotta 4,725,927
Bundeli/Bundelkhan 3,072,147
Bagheli/Baghel Khan 2,865,011
Pahari 2,832,825
Laman/Lambadi 2,707,562
Awadhi 2,529,308
Harauti 2,462,867
Garhwali 2,267,314
Nimadi 2,148,146
Sadan/Sadri 2,044,776
Kumauni 2,003,783
Dhundhari 1,871,130
Surgujia 1,458,533
Bagri Rajasthani 1,434,123
Banjari 1,259,821
Nagpuria (Varhadi) 1,242,586
Surjapuri 1,217,019
Kangri 1,122,843
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Regional languages
In British India, English was the sole language used for administrative purposes as well as for higher education
purposes. When India became independent in 1947, the Indian legislators had the challenge of choosing a language for
official communication as well as for communication between different linguistic regions across India. The choices
available were:
Making "Hindi", which a plurality of the people (43%)
[citation needed]
identified as their mother tongue, the official
language, though only a minority of these "Hindi" speakers spoke Hindi proper.
Making English, as preferred by non-Hindi speakers, particularly Tamils and Kannadigas, and those from
Mizoram and Nagaland, the official language. See also Anti-Hindi agitations.
Declare both Hindi and English as official languages and each state is given freedom to choose the official
language of the state.
The Indian constitution, in 1950, declared Hindi in Devanagari script to be the official language of the union.
[37]
Unless
Parliament decided otherwise, the use of English for official purposes was to cease 15 years after the constitution came into
effect, i.e., on 26 January 1965.
[37]
The prospect of the changeover, however, led to much alarm in the non Hindi-speaking
areas of India, especially Dravidian-speaking states in South India whose languages were not related to Hindi at all (see
examples at right). As a result, Parliament enacted the Official Languages Act, 1963,
[38][39][40][41][42][43]
which provided for the
continued use of English for official purposes along with Hindi, even after 1965.