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India is a land of a variety of linguistic communities, each of which share a common language and culture. Though there could be fifteen principal languages there are hundreds of thousands dialects that add to the vividness of the country. India has nothing less than 1652 mother tongues, if all the various dialects of each parent language are to be included! Enough to confuse a linguist. But not so for a multitude of cultural groups in continuous flux. Most of the languages are limited to a small number of peoples, and only 33 of them are spoken by more than a lakh people.
18 languages are officially recognized in India of which Sanskrit and Tamil share a long history of more than 5,000 and 3,000 years respectively. The population of people speaking each language varies drastically. For example Hindi has 250 million speakers, while Andamanese is spoken by relatively fewer people.
Tribal or Aboriginal language speaking population in India may be more than some of the European languages. For instance Bhili and Santali both tribal languages have more than 4 million speakers. The vividness can be ascertained by the fact that schools in India teach more than 50 different languages; there are Films in 15 languages, Newspapers in 90 or more languages and radio programmes in 71 languages!
Indian languages come from four distinct families, which are: Indo-European, Dravidian, Mon-Khmer, and Sino-Tibetan. Majority of Indian population uses Indo-European and Dravidian languages. The language families divide India geographically too.
Indo-European languages dominate the northern and central India while in south India; mainly languages of Dravidian origin are spoken. In eastern India languages of Mon-Khmer group is popular. Sino Tibetan languages are spoken in the northern Himalayas and close to Burmese border. In terms of percentage, 75% of Indian population speaks languages of Indo-European family, 23% speak languages of Dravidian origin and about 2% of the population speaks Mon-Khmer languages and Sino-Tibetan languages.
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Hindi - The official Language of India
The Indian Constitution (Article 343) declares Hindi to be the official language of the Union. The Khariboli dialect written in the Devanagri script is the chosen one. Hindi is also the mother tongue of about 20% of the Indian population, in the area known as the
'Hindi-belt' or the 'cow-belt' of northern India.
This includes the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Haryana and Himachal Pradesh also have Hindi as their official language. Like the other languages of the north, it is of an Indo-Aryan origin. But in south India, it's quite a different scene altogether. The Dravidian languages bear little resemblance to their Indic or Indo-Aryan counterparts.
Apart from the more widely spoken English and Hindi, there are the various regional languages. Each state has its own language which is also its official language. The Constitution of India lists 18 such regional languages.
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