Linguistic diversity of India How many languages do we have in India? The answer depends on how one counts it. The latest information that we have is from the Census of India held in . This census recorded more than distinct languages which people mentioned as their mother tongues.
These languages were grouped together under some major languages. For example, languages like Bhojpuri, Magadhi, Bundelkhandi, Chhattisgarhi, Rajasthani and many others were grouped together under ‘Hindi’. Even after this grouping, the Census found major languages. Of these, languages are now included in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution and are therefore called ‘Scheduled Languages’.
Others are called ‘non-Scheduled Languages’. In terms of languages, India is perhaps the most diverse country in the world. A look at the enclosed table makes it clear that no one language is the mother tongue of the majority of our population. The largest language, Hindi, is the mother tongue of only about per cent Indians.
If we add to that all those who knew Hindi as their second or third language, the total number was still less than per cent in . As for English, only . per cent Indians recorded it as their mother tongue. Another per cent knew it as a second or third language.
Read this table carefully, but you need not memorise it. Just do the following: Make a bar or pie chart on the basis of this information. Prepare a map of linguistic diversity of India by shading the region where each of these languages is spoken on the map of India. Find out about any three languages that are spoken in India but are not included in this table.
Scheduled Languages of India Language Proportion of speakers (%) Assamese . Bengali . Bodo . Dogri .
Gujarati . Hindi . Kannada . Kashmiri .
Konkani . Maithili . Malayalam . Manipuri .
Marathi . Nepali . Odia . Punjabi .
Sanskrit N Santali . Sindhi . Tamil . Telugu .
Urdu . N — Stands for negligible. Source :