The Many Languages of India

THE MANY LANGUAGES OF INDIA
India is one of the most linguistically diversified country in the world. The
number of languages spoken in India is 1.3 billion. It is quite difficult to
pinpoint the exact number of languages. Different sources give different
numbers and that is because of different ideas. According to ethnologue there
are 448 languages; People’s linguistic survey of India are 780 languages.
According to responses to the Indian Census Data there are total of 19,569
languages in the country, this is because people can call their mother tongue
whatever they want. These 19,569 languages where grouped into 1369 mother
tongue. It was further classified into a group of 121 languages which is spoken
by a total of 10,000+ speakers.
India has officially 2 languages at National level, that is, Hindi & English.
And there are also 22 scheduled languages. Each state/union territory has the
right to choose its own officially languages. Most of the languages in India fall
into two families: The Indo-Aryan family, a branch of Indo-European
language family, which is predominant in the northern India. The Dravidian
language family is the language family which is predominant in the southern
India. The top 10 spoken languages in India are Hindi, Bengali, Marathi,
Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Urdu, Kannada, Odia and Malayalam. For each
language, the numbers includes all the mother tongues associated with that
language. For example, for the language of Hindi, which is spoken by a total
of 528 million (43.63%), includes the languages of the Hindi belt which forms
a dialect continuum with related other languages like the languages of
Rajasthan, Bihar and Pahari.
Dravidian Languages: It is known that the Dravidian language was present in
India before the arrival of the Indo-European language which is more than 3500
years ago. There are theories that the Dravidian languages could be related to
the Uralic languages like Finish and Hungarian or the Altaic language family
like Turkish, Korean, Japanese and so on. The oldest existing Dravidian
languages are the Tamil Brahmi inscriptions some of which date back to the
3rd or 4th BCE. The extensive Tamil literary tradition goes back earlier than 300
BCE. There are also some inscriptions of some Telugu words dating back to
sometime 400 BCE and 100 BCE; Inscriptions about Kannada words dating
back to the 3rd century. The major of these languages have all being
significantly influenced by Sanskrit. Tamil is most conservative of the
Dravidian languages and has been influenced by Sanskrit the least. Tamil is the
ancestor of the Dravidian language. The language of Malayalam developed
from a dialect of Tamil, and then became Sanskritized.
The Indo-Aryan languages: The Indo-Aryan languages are directly descended
from Sanskrit. Sanskrit developed over times into Prakrits, which is the middle
Indo-Aryan languages. The Prakrit languages were developed into the Indo-
Aryan languages of North India like Marathi, Hindi, Bengali and so on. The
Latin language was further developed into Vulgar Latin languages like French,
Spanish and Italian. Pali which is widely studied is the lamguage of the
Theravada Buddhist scriptures. The language of Buddha is likely Pali or the
closely related Magadhi Prakrit. Magadhi is the ancestor of the eastern Indo-
Aryan languages like Bengali and others. The Shauraseni is the ancestor of the
central Indo-Aryan language which include the Hindi languages. The
Maharashtri Prakrit is the ancestor of the southern Indo-Aryan language
Konkani, Marathi, and so on. The Indo-Aryan language is influenced by the
Dravidian languages due to contact over the millennia.
Dravidian influence on Indo-Aryan languages: The language Marathi
contains a significant amount of agglutination, a Dravidian feature, and it also
contains a lot of Dravidian vocabulary. Features of Indo-Aryan languages:
o The Indo-Aryan languages are not agglutinative like the Dravidian
languages but are rather fissional.
o Punjabi is the only tonal language in the Indo-Aryan family (one of the
few tonal Indo-European languages).
o The Indo-Aryan language were all significantly influenced by Persian and
to a lesser extent Turkic and Arabic (because of Turkic Muslim rule).
The Delhi sultanate first introduced the Persian language and its literary
tradition in the 13th century. This continued with the Mughal Empire from the
16th century up until the beginning of the British rule. Persian was the official
language of the empire, the lingua franca of the elite, and a prestigious literary
language. There was much less Persian influence on the Dravidian language.
This was because the Northern India was more consistently under Muslim
control than the South. Urdu is the Indian language that is most heavily
influenced by Persian.
Sino-Tibetan language: Two of the 22 scheduled languages are the Sino-
Tibetan language: Bodo & Meitei (Manipuri). Bodo is co-official in the state
of Assam and official in the Bodoland autonomous region. Meitei is the
official language of Manipur. These languages function as lingua franca in
their respective areas. The Assamese language is the most widely lingua franca.
many Sino-Tibetan languages in north-eastern India belong to the Tibeto-
Burman subfamily, and are grouped graphically into a branch of Tibeto-
Burman.
Northeastern India is the most linguistically diverse of the area of the country
with around 75% of the country’s language. Many of the languages also feature
great dialect variation with low mutual intelligibility, making it necessary to use
a separate lingua franca for communication.
Austro-Asiatic: Santali is an Austro-Asiatic language. It is a recognized
regional language spoken in Odisha, Bihar, Assam, West Bengal, Jharkhand and
small populations in Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura.
Scripts are one of the most intriguing aspects of India’s linguistic diversity.
According to the People’s Linguistic Survey of India, 66 different scripts are
used. Most of the languages use scripts derived from the Brahmi script-
the oldest readable script in the subcontinent. The only oldest script is the
Indus script dating back as far as 5500 years. Devanagiri is the most widely
used script in India. Hindi, Rajasthani, Nepali, Maithili, Kashmiri, Marathi,
Sindhi and also Sanskrit. Gujarati script was developed from Devanagiri and is
used for writing Gujarati. Bengali script is also developed from Devanagiri and
is used for writing Bengali.
But many Indians are multi-lingual, so they might fully communicate in Hindi,
or in other language or in English.

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THE MANY LANGUAGES OF INDIA

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