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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, of which 24 languages are spoken by a million or more people. 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. Two classical languages native to the land are Sanskrit and Tamil. Article 343 of the Indian Constitution recognises Hindi in Dēvanāgari script as the official language of the union the Constitution also allows for the continuation of use of the English language for official purposes. Article 345 provides constitutional recognition to "national 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 . 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 "regional languages", spoken throughout the country, namely Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Meitei, 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 3500 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, another ancient language is widely spoken in Dakshina Kannada, Udupi districts of Karnataka and Kasargod district of Kerala.
History 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. Each language had different influences, with Hindi/Urdu and closely related languages being strongly influenced by Persian and Arabic. Writing and sound systems 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 organized. They are organized according to phonetic principle, unlike the Roman alphabet, which has a random sequence of letters. The classification is as follows Finally, the list of vowels is separately specified, as follows a, ā, i, ī, u, ū, ē (e in IAST), ai, ō (o in IAST), au The "ē" 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 , , , and 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 , , , and 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 above scheme records that the nasal occurring in conjunction with any given row has a sound characteristic that row. For instance the nasalization occurring in the word "Ganga" is that of the first row, while the nasalization occurring in the words "India" or "integral" are characteristically front palatals. Speakers of any language have to necessarily speak in this manner though they never realize it. The economy of this classification in the fact that effectively each 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 been achieved by having only one symbol for each of the five consonants, with the specific hardening and aspiration understood from context while reading. Tamil script indeed spells kathai (story) and gadhai (mace - weapon of Bhima) the same. List of Indian Languages There are a large number of languages in India; 216 of them are spoken by a group of 10,000 persons or more. See also | ||||||||
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