Languages of India

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The languages of India primarily belong to two major linguistic families, Indo-European (whose branch Indo-Aryan is spoken by about 74% of the population) and Dravidian (spoken by about 24%). Other languages spoken in India come mainly from the Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman linguistic families, as well as a few language isolates.^[1] The number of mother tongues in India is as high as 1,652^[2], of which 24 languages are spoken by a million or more people. Three millennia of language contact situation have led to a lot of 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.^[3] In 2004, the government elevated Tamil.^[4][5][6] to the newly created official status of "Classical Language", followed by Sanskrit^[7] in 2005.

Article 343 of the Indian Constitution recognises Hindi in Dēvanāgari script as the official language of the union government^[8]; the Constitution also allows for the continuation of use of the English language for official purposes. Article 345 provides constitutional recognition to "Official languages" of the union to include any language adopted by a State Legislature as the official language of that state. In effect, there are "Official Languages at the state and center level but no one "national language". 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, Manipuri and Nepali, thereby increasing the number of official regional languages of India to 18 ^[9]. Individual states, whose borders are mostly drawn on socio-linguistic lines, are free to decide their own language for internal administration and education. The Constitution of India recognises 22 "regional languages", spoken throughout the country, namely Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Meitei, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Hindi is the official language of the states Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttaranchal, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and the National Capital Territory of Delhi. English is the co-official language of the Indian Union, and that each of the several states mentioned above may also have another co-official language.

Contents 1 Language families 2 History 3 Language Conflicts 4 Writing systems 4.1 Romanization 5 List of Indian Languages 6 Footnotes and References 7 See also 8 External links

[edit] Language families

The languages of India may be grouped by major 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), but also including minority languages such as Persian, Portuguese or French, and English as lingua franca. The second largest is the Dravidian family, accounting for some 200 million speakers. Minor families are the Munda (some 9 million speakers) and Tibeto-Burman (some 6 million) ones. There is also a language isolate, the Nihali language.

[edit] History

Main article: Linguistic history of India

The northern Indian languages from the Indo-European family evolved from Old Indo-Aryan such as Sanskrit, by way of the Middle Indo-Aryan Prakrit languages and Apabhramsha of the Middle Ages. There is no consensus for a specific time where the modern north Indian languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Panjabi, and Bengali emerged, but c. AD 1000 is commonly accepted.^[10] Each language had different influences, with Hindi/Urdu and closely related languages being strongly influenced by Persian and Arabic. The South Indian (Dravidian) languages had a history independent of Sanskrit. However in later stages all the Dravidian languages had been heavily influenced by Sanskrit. The major Dravidian languages are Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam.

[edit] Language Conflicts

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There are some significant conflicts over linguistic rights in India.

The first major linguistic conflict took place in Tamil Nadu against the implementation of Hindi as the official language of India, known as Anti-Hindi agitations. This movement brought DMK to power and lead to the ousting and nearly total elimination of the Congress party in Tamil Nadu.[1] Strong regional language pride is also found in other Indian states such as Bengal, Maharashtra, Karnataka.^{[citation needed]} Fears of local languages being wiped out^{[citation needed]} has forced Maharastra and Karnataka Governments to make the local languages compulsory in educational institutions [2].

The Government of India attempts to assuage these conflicts with various campaigns, coordinated by the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore, a branch of the Department of Higher Education, Language Bureau, Ministry of Human Resource Development. Under the pressure of Tamil activism, the Tamil language in 2004 was elevated to a newly created official status of "classical language" together with Sanskrit in a symbolic gesture emphasizing the equal treatment of the two major linguistic groups in India, Indo-Aryan and Dravidian.

See also: language movement, Pure Tamil movement.

[edit] Writing systems

Main articles: Indic scripts and Nasta'liq script

Indian languages have corresponding distinct alphabets. The two major families are those of the Dravidian languages and those of the Indo-Aryan languages, the former largely confined to the south and the latter to the north. Urdu and sometimes Kashmiri, Sindhi and Panjabi are written in modified versions of the Arabic script. Except for these languages, the alphabets of Indian languages are native to India. Most scholars consider these Indic scripts a distant offshoot of the Aramaic alphabet, although there are differing opinions.

[edit] Romanization

Main articles: ISO 15919 and National Library at Kolkata romanization

	unvoiced consonants		voiced consonants		nasals
	unaspirated	aspirated	unaspirated	aspirated
velar plosives	k	kh	g	gh	ṅ
palatal affricates	c	ch	j	jh	ñ
retroflex plosives	ṭ	ṭh	ḍ	ḍh	ṇ
dental plosives	t	th	d	dh	n
bilabial plosives	p	ph	b	bh	m

glides and approximants

y

r

l

v

fricatives

ś

ṣ

s

h

[edit] List of Indian Languages

There are a large number of languages in India; 216 of them are spoken by a group of 10,000 persons or more.

• Official languages of India
• List of Indian languages by total speakers

[edit] Footnotes and References

[edit] See also

• Languages of Pakistan

[edit] External links

• List of Languages of India
• Languages and Scripts of India
• Words and phrases in 26 Indian languages
• Titus - Languages of India
• Diversity of Languages in India
• KeyTrans Hindi intelligent transliteration email and spell check
• CommunityWhitePages.NET – Community White Pages is a database of all Indians across the globe categorized by Language, Community and Geographical location. The goal of this listing is to Connect All Indians.

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