Languages Of India
India has 18 languages recognized by the constitution and as many as 1600 minor languages and more than one thousand dialects.English is widely spoken and understood in urban sectors.Hindi is the national language and predominantly spoken in the northern states,even though due to the needs of the cross-country tourism and penetration of the hindi films,it is understood fairly well elsewhere as well.the country’s peculiar history of assimilation of different cultures is mainly responsible for this wide variety.Hindi spoken as a mother tongue by 400 million people is India’s official language.The use of English is also enshrined in the Constitution for a wide range of official purposes, notably communication between Hindi and non-Hindi speaking states.With the beginning of second millennium,new languages started to emerge from all over the sub-continent.These were expressions of regional aspirations,in protest against the hegemony of Sanskrit and its culture,Sanskriti.In the north,the regional dialects or Apabhramsha asserted themselves as independent languages.
The middle Indo-Aryan dialect in the east split into Bangla and Oriya. Subsequently,Bangla gave birth to Assamiya.The north-western dialect developed into Kashimiri,Sindhi and Punjabi.The western Apabhramsha split into Hindi which till the beginning of the 19th century exsited as several distinct dialects – Gujarati and Marathi.The Hindi family also interacted with languages – Persian and Arabic and produced Urdu.A similar movement also occurred in the south – Tamil branched into Telugu and Tamil Kannada dialect earlier,jointly gave birth to Malayalam. Initially, all the Indian languages were thought to have branched from Sanskrit. Gradually ,the Dravidic family was noticed,the source of which was Tamil.Hindi was claimed as the mother tongue by 20.85 crores in 1971, and by 26.45 crores in 1981.At the other end of the spectrum,six of the scheduled languages – Sindhi, Nepali,KonKani,Manipuri,Kashimiri and Sanskrit together do not have more than 0.75 crore speakers.
The remaining eleven languages – Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Malayalam, Marathi, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi,Tamil and Urdu are spoken by almost half of the population of India. These figures show that there is a five fold structure in terms of development,with Hindi and English at the top.Next come the major literary languages such as Bengali, Oriya, Marathi, Tamil, Kannada, Punjabi and Urdu.After this,comes the other major group with a smaller number of speakers like Sindhi,Manipuri,Konkani.at the tail end are the two remaining group languages like Kachchi, Ahirani and Marwadi that are not recognized as separate and languages like Bhantu which are spoken by tribal and nomadic communities.
