Languages of India
The
languages of India primarily belong to two major
linguistic families,
Indo-European (whose branch
Indo-Aryan is spoken by about 74% of the population) and
Dravidian (spoken by about 24%). Other languages spoken in India come from the
Austro-Asiatic and
Tibeto-Burman linguistic families, as well as numerous
language isolates. The
Andamanese languages, spoken on the
Andaman Islands, are apparently
not related to any other language family. The number of
mother tongues in India is as high as 1,652. There are 24 languages which are spoken by a million or more people, in addition to thousands of smaller languages. Three millennia of language contact situation have led to a lot of mutual influence among the four language families in India and South Asia. Three contact languages have played an important role in the
history of India: Sanskrit, Persian and English.
[Bhatia, Tej K and William C. Ritchie. (2006) Bilingualism in South Asia. In: Handbook of Bilingualism, pp. 780-807. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.] Two
classical languages native to the land are
Sanskrit[News item that appeared in "The Hindu" on the Cabinet decision to declare Sanskrit as a classical language.] and
Tamil.
[Item 41 of President Kalam's address to a joint sitting of both houses of Indian Parliament][BBC news item on the formal approval by the Indian Cabinet][ the report submitted by Tamil Nadu State Government to Central Government of India to claim the Classic Language status.]Article 343 of the
Indian Constitution recognises
Hindi in
D"vanāgari script as the
official language of the union
["Part XVII, Chapter 1. Article 343". Constitution of India. Government of India.]; the Constitution also allows for the continuation of use of the
English language for official purposes. Article 345 provides constitutional recognition to "regional languages" of the union to include any language adopted by a
State Legislature as the official language of that state. Until the Twenty-First Amendment of the Constitution in 1967, the country recognised 14 official regional languages. The Eighth Schedule and the Seventy-First Amendment provided for the inclusion of
Sindhi,
Konkani,
Manipuri and
Nepali, thereby increasing the number of official regional languages of India to 18
["Legislation: Legislation dealing with the use of languages". Constitution of India. Articles 29, 30, 120, 210, 343-351 as amended in the 21st and 71st Amendments.]. Individual states, whose borders are mostly drawn on socio-linguistic lines, are free to decide their own language for internal administration and education. The Constitution of India recognises 22 "national languages", spoken throughout the country, namely
Assamese,
Bengali,
Bodo,
Dogri,
Gujarati,
Hindi,
Kannada,
Kashmiri,
Konkani,
Maithili,
Malayalam,
Manipuri,
Marathi,
Nepali,
Oriya,
Punjabi,
Sanskrit,
Santhali,
Sindhi,
Tamil,
Telugu and
Urdu. Hindi, apart from being an official language of the Union of India, is the official language of the states Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttaranchal, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and the National Capital Territory of Delhi. English is the co-official language of the Indian Union, and that each of the several states mentioned above may also have another co-official language.
The two classical languages
Sanskrit and
Tamil have large collections of literature, with the earliest Sanskrit texts dating from 5000 years ago and the earliest
Tamil literature from 2500 years ago. An official language, and the main language of Hindu liturgy,
Sanskrit is used in rituals and ceremonies or as part of daily prayers in
Hinduism. Though not prevalent in every-day use, it is interestingly being revived as a spoken tongue in the village of
Mattur, in the
Shimoga district of
Karnataka.
Kannada, the language of
Karnataka has a known history of 2000 years and is richly endowed with a large body of ancient and modern literature.
Telugu, a mellifluous language also has a notably ancient history and body of literature, and is widely used in
Carnatic music.
Tulu Language is widely spoken in Dakshina Kannada,Udupi district of Karnataka and Kasargod district of Kerala.
Tulu is also spoken in Mumbai (Bombay city) and surrounding districts like Thane in Maharastra.
The northern Indian languages from the Indo-European family evolved from Old Indo-Aryan such as
Sanskrit, by way of the
Middle Indo-Aryan Prakrit languages and
Apabhramsha of the
Middle Ages. There is no consensus for a specific time where the modern north Indian languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Panjabi, and Bengali emerged, but c. 1,000 AD is commonly accepted.
[Shapiro, M: Hindi.] Each language had different influences, with Hindi/Urdu and closely related languages being strongly influenced by Persian and Arabic.
Indian languages have corresponding distinct alphabets. The two major families are those of the
Dravidian languages and those of the
Indo-Aryan languages, the former largely confined to the
south and the latter to the
north. Urdu and sometimes
Kashmiri,
Sindhi and
Panjabi are written in modified versions of the Arabic script. Except for these languages, the alphabets of Indian languages are native to India. There are those scholars who believe the scripts of the Northern languages (like
Sanskrit,
Bengali,
Hindi and
Punjabi) to be distant derivations of the
Aramaic alphabet, though this is a disputed theory primarily because the number and grouping of sounds and letters are so radically different.
Phonetic alphabet
A remarkable feature of the alphabets of India is the manner in which they are organised. They are organised according to phonetic principle, unlike the Roman alphabet, which has a random sequence of letters.
The classification is as follows
| unvoiced consonants | voiced consonants | nasals |
| unaspirated | aspirated | unaspirated | aspirated | | | velar plosives | k | kh | g | gh | ṅ |
| palatal affricates | c | ch | j | jh | ñ |
| retroflex plosives | ṭ | ṭh | ḍ | ḍh | ṇ |
| dental plosives | t | th | d | dh | n* |
| bilabial plosives | p | ph | b | bh | m |
| glides and approximants | y | r | l | v |
*The Sanskrit "n" is actually alveolar, although some of the Dravidian languages distinguish between dental and alveolar variants.This classification is observed in most of the languages under discussion with the notable exception of
Tamil, which uses a
different system. Additionally, each language has a few special letters signifying sounds specific to that language and some also have symbols representing
ligatures and
geminates. In the
Malayalam script, there is also a separate set of letters for consonants with no inherent vowel (called cillakṣarams). These symbols exist only for some consonants (generally those that are frequently found at the ends of words), however, and the
virama is used to strip the vowel from most consonants.
Finally, the list of vowels is separately specified, as follows
a, ā, i, ī, u, ū, " (e in IAST), ai, ō (o in IAST), auThe """ and the "ō" represent long vowels and there are no corresponding short equivalents in Sanskrit - this is why no macrons are used for them in IAST. However, several other Indian languages have a short "e" and "o" in addition to the vowels listed above. Additionally, in
Sanskrit and Sanskrit-influenced languages (like
Malayalam), the vowels ṛ, ṝ, ḷ and ḹ are included. Note that when considered as pairs the vowels represent shorter and longer versions of "same" (as traditionally classified) vowel. Here the first a is roughly like the "u" in English "bus". In languages of Eastern India like
Bengali,
Oriya and
Assamese, the inherent short vowel is pronounced as a short o rather than a.
The classification of these sounds is universal amongst the
Indo-Aryan languages. Each of these has a corresponding symbol, and also, with some modifications, the corresponding sound. For instance,
English has
phones similar to the ṭ, ṭh, ḍ, and ḍh of the third row, but these manifest as only two
phonemes, t and d. In French on the other hand, the third row is absent, but phones similar to the t and d of the fourth row are used.
For nasals, Sanskrit imposes considerable systematics. The abovescheme records that the nasal occurring in conjunction with any givenrow has a sound characteristic that row. For instance the nasalisationoccurring in the word "Ganga" is that of the first row, while thenasalisation occurring in the words "India" or "integral" are character-istically front palatals. Speakers of any language have to necessarilyspeak in this manner though they never realise it.
The economy of this classification in the fact that effectivelyeach of the five main rows is generated by one base sound,the others are systematic modifications of the same. In
Tamil, a great simplification of alphabet has beenachieved by having only one symbol for each of the five consonants,with the specific hardening and aspiration understood from contextwhile reading. Tamil script indeed spells
kathai (story) and
gadhai (mace - weapon of Bhima) the same.
There are a large number of languages in India; 216 of them are spoken by a group of 10,000 persons or more.
*
List of national languages of India*
List of Indian languages by total speakers
*
Languages of Pakistan*
List of Languages of India*
Languages and Scripts of India*
Words and phrases in 24 Indian languages
