A Brief Overview of Languages Spoken in India

India is the only country in the world with 1.25 billion people from different cultures, traditions and religions. This diversity makes India unique and attracts millions of tourists, academics and linguists every year. Thus we bring you a brief overview of languages spoken in India by tracing their history and roots.

1. The official language of India is Hindi & English : As per the Constitution of India, no language is accounted as the national language. However, as per Article 343, there are 22 official languages of India. After the Independence in 1947, only Hindi was considered as the official language but problems and protests from non-Hindi speaking states kept rising. In 1965, the use of English language was introduced for official purposes and smooth functionary of the centre and state in India.
2. There are 22 regional official languages in India : Until The Constitution Act of 1967, there were only 14 officially recognised languages in India. Sindhi, Konkani, Meitei and Nepali were added in 2007. There are 99 other unofficial languages in India. 96.71% of Indians have one of the 22 languages as their mother tongue. Overall, it is estimated that, there are 270 identifiable mother tongues.
3. Most Dravidian languages are spoken in south India : Dravidian languages are a family of language mostly spoken in South India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and some parts of Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan. The four main languages of this family are Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada. It is also one of the largest families of language owings upto 13% of India’s population and around 245 million native speakers.

4. Tamil & Sanskrit, world’s oldest languages originated from India : Sanskrit belongs to Indo-European family of languages with roots originating 4,000 years ago. It was also the language used to define Hindu philosophy, Buddhism and Jainism. 24,821 Indians claimed Sanskrit to be their mother tongue and 69 million claimed Tamil in 2011. Tamil is considered older than Sanskrit simply because Sangam Literature was recorded in Tamil language. It is considered the most ancient literature in India dating from 100 B.C. to 300 B.C.
This Quora thread sheds more information on the Tamil-Sanskit debate.

5. 125 million Indians claim to speak English : Four languages spoken in India, barring English, feature in the list of top ten spoken languages of the world. These four languages are Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Punjabi. In 2012, BBC claimed that there are more than 125 million people in India who can speak English. The number of English speaking population of our country is also 1/10th (one tenth) of the total population and only preceded by the United States of America.

More information can be sourced from The Official Indian Languages Act of 1963.

Source : Census of India, 2011

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Written by Roshan Kokane.