| 1) As befits a nation as big as
Western Europe and with a population of over a billion people, India
has a great diversity of language. There are 407 living languages
spoken in India and a further 11 extinct languages of which people have
knowledge. 2) The various states of India are formed on a linguistic basis and there are 18 official state languages. Hindi, written in the Devagagari script, is the official language of the Republic of India and is spoken by almost 500 million people worldwide. As such it is the second largest native language in the world. Around 20% of all Indians claim Hindi as their mother tongue. The second official language of the Republic of India is English and is the authoritative, legislative and judicial language. As such it is in many ways the ‘real’ official language of India and for many educated Indians it is almost a first language. 3) The various languages of India are closely associated with different ethnic groups and are usually divided into four main groups. They are Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan and Austric. Of these, the first two, Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, cover almost 99% of the population of India. 4) The largest group of languages belong to the Indo-Aryan family (a branch of the Indo-European family of languages) and they are descended from the tongue of the Aryan peoples who appeared in the north-west of India in the second millennia BC and became the dominant racial group in the whole northern half of the country. The principle languages in the north and west of present-day India are all of Indo-Aryan descent and include Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Sindhi, Rajasthani, Bihari, Kashmiri, Pahari, Urdu and Sanskrit. Approximately 74% of the Indian population speaks one or another of these languages. 5) Dravidian, the second largest group, consists of languages found in the south of India. Historical orthodoxy suggests that with the arrival of the Aryan people, the original inhabitants of Dravidian stock were pushed into the south of the continent. Dravidian languages have no relationship with any language families outside of the Indian subcontinent and this indicates they are a purely indigenous development of ancient lineage. The major Dravidian languages are Tamil (the oldest), Kannada, Malayalam (the smallest) and Telugu (the biggest). All four of these are official state languages although there are almost twenty more Dravidian languages, many classed as tribal. One, Brahui, is the only Dravidian language not spoken in India. It is spoken in Baluchistan in Pakistan and some scholars think its location indicates a greater spread of the Indus Valley civilization than hitherto believed. Around 25% of the Indian population speak one or other of the Dravidian tongues. It is worth noting that there is a vast differnce between the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages and very often the only way northerners can speak with southerners is by using their only common language – English. This is one reason for the continued ubiquity of English in India. 6) The Sino-Tibetan language family is, as its name suggests, related to the languages spoken in Tibet and China. In India it is present in those area that border on the Himalayan mountains from Ladakh in the west all the way to Assam on the north-eastern frontier of India and include Lahuli, Ladhaki, Sikkimese, Sherpa and many others. 7) The Austric languages are related to many of the languages spoken in south-east Asia and in India are found in central, eastern and north-eastern India and the Indian Ocean islands. The two most important of these languages are Santhali with around 5 million speakers and Mundari which has about 1 million. 8) With such a number of languages residing within the borders of one nation, India surely deserves to be called a sub-continent. Indeed, the number of languages spoken in the Americas or in Europe, both classed as continents, cannot match the linguistic variety found in India. |