The many languages of modern India

Fun fact from 'Eaten by a Fish'

The diversity of India is nowhere more evident than in its languages. Multilingualism is a common feature of life in India, and it will be rare, if not impossible, to find anyone who uses only a single language in their daily life. We move effortlessly across languages, often without conscious effort. We may use one language at home, another with friends, and yet another at work.

The Census of India, undertaken every ten years since 1872, collects, compiles and analyses demographic, social, and economic data about all persons in the country at the time. This includes the collection of language data — for instance, the languages spoken in the country, by how many people, in which geographic region or regions, the prevalence of bilingualism and trilingualism in the population and so on. This information is compiled and presented in a Language Atlas of India. The first such Atlas was published in 2004; it was based on the data collected in the 1991 Census. The information presented below is from the latest Language Atlas. This is is based on the data collected during the 2011 Census, the 15th and most recent Census of India (the 2021 Census was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic).

The Constitution of India recognises 22 national languages. These are Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telegu, and Urdu. Listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, these languages are known collectively as the “scheduled languages”.

This list includes the six “classical” languages of India, a categorisation based on the antiquity of the language and other, somewhat nebulous factors such as an ‘original’ literary tradition and the existence of a body of ancient texts regarded and valued as their literary heritage by generations of speakers. As of date, the following languages have been deemed “classical”: Tamil (declared in 2004), Sanskrit (2005), Kannada (2008), Telugu (2008), Malayalam (2013), and Odia (2014).

India has no national language. Hindi (written in the Devanagari script) is the official language of the Union of India, together with English.

In addition to the 22 scheduled languages, a further 99 “non-scheduled” languages were identified by the Census of India, 2011.

This brings the total number of languages in India to 121.

However this number does not reflect the dialects, the variants, and the many languages that have fewer than 10,000 speakers each.

In a country as vast and linguistically diverse as India, language identification is a complex matter and some loss of detail is inevitable in the presentation of data. For the purposes of Census enumeration, the 2011 Census defined those who ‘speak’ a language as those who stated that language to be their mother-tongue. So, for example, there were 52,83,47,193 Hindi speakers in the country. This number did not include those people who may speak Hindi but have not declared it as their mother-tongue.

Further, ‘mother-tongue’ was defined as “the language spoken in childhood by the person’s mother to the person”. If the person’s mother had died while the person was still an infant, the language spoken in the person’s home was considered to be the mother-tongue. In the case of “infants and deaf mutes”, the language usually spoken by the mother was recorded. And, if there was any doubt about the language spoken by the mother, the language spoken by the household was to be recorded.

The census enumerators were also instructed “to record the mother-tongue in full, whatever may be the name of the language returned by the respondents.”

This last requirement, unsurprisingly, resulted in a staggeringly large number of “mother-tongues” being returned by the respondents, and the 2011 Census recorded an incredible 19,569 mother-tongue names in total.

This data was subjected to rigorous analysis: errors and false responses were eliminated and the linguistic affiliation of the returned names to actual languages and dialects was determined. This rationalisation of the data resulted in 1369 mother-tongues which were further classified, and 1474 mother-tongue names which remained unclassified and therefore categorised as “Others”.

The number of speakers was introduced as a further constraint, and a total list of classified mother tongues returned by more than 10,000 speakers each at an all-India level and grouped under appropriate languages was then prepared. This yielded a total of 270 identifiable mother tongues; of these, 123 mother tongues are grouped under the 22 scheduled languages and 147 mother tongues are grouped under 99 other, non-scheduled languages. Those mother tongues which had fewer than 10,000 speakers each but were classified under a particular language were included in “Others” under that language.

So, for example, four mother tongues, each with more than 10,000 speakers, are grouped under Bengali as its variants (these are Bengali, Chakma, Haijong and Rajbangsi). The mother tongues that were variants of Bengali but returned less than 10,000 speakers are grouped under “Others”. Similarly, five mother tongues with more than 10,000 speakers each are grouped under Tamil as variants (these are Irula/Irular Mozhi, Kaikadi, Korava, Tamil, and Yerukala; the other variants were grouped under “Others”). By far the greatest number of mother tongues, 56 with more than 10,000 speakers each, are grouped under Hindi as variants.

The category “Total of other languages” includes all languages spoken by less than 10,000 speakers each or not identifiable linguistically.

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