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2009/11/23
LANGUAGES IN INDIA
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ALL COMPETITIVE GURU
2009/11/23
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LANGUAGES IN INDIA
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LANGUAGES IN INDIA
The 1961 census recorded 1,652 different languages and dialects
in India; one state alone, Madhya Pradesh, had 377. There are
officially 211 separate, distinct languages, of which Hindi,
English, and 15 regional languages are officially recognized by
the constitution. There are 24 languages that are each spoken by
a million or more persons.
The most important speech group, culturally and numerically,
is the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family, consisting
of languages that are derived from Sanskrit. Hindi, spoken as the
mother tongue by about 240 million people (30% of the total
population) in 1999, is the principal language in this family. Urdu
differs from Hindi in being written in the Arabic-Farsi script and
containing a large mixture of Arabic and Farsi words. Western
Hindi, Eastern Hindi, Bihari, and Pahari are recognized separate
Hindi dialects. Other Indo-Aryan languages include Assamese,
Bengali, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Rajasthani,
and Sindhi. Languages of Dravidian stock are dominant in
southern India and include Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and
Malayalam. A few tribal languages of eastern India, such as Ho
and Santali, fit into the aboriginal Munda family, which predates
the Dravidian family on the subcontinent. Smaller groups in
Assam and the Himalayas speak languages of Mon-Khmer and
Tibeto-Chinese origin.
English is spoken as the native tongue by an estimated 10–15
million Indians and is widely employed in government,
education, science, communications, and industry; it is often a
second or third language of the educated classes. Although Hindi
in Devanagari script is the official language, English is also
recognized for official purposes. According to government policy,
Hindi is the national language; for that reason, Hindi instruction
in non-Hindi areas is being rapidly increased, and large numbers
of scientific and other modern words are being added to its
vocabulary. However, there has been considerable resistance to
the adoption of Hindi in the Dravidian-language areas of
southern India, as well as in some of the Indo-Aryan-speaking
areas, especially West Bengal.
The importance of regional languages was well demonstrated
in 1956, when the states were reorganized along linguistic
boundaries. Thus, multilingual Hyderabad state was abolished by
giving its Marathi-speaking sections to Mumbai (formerly
Bombay, now in Maharashtra), its Telugu sections to Andhra
Pradesh, and its Kannada sections to Mysore (now Karnataka).
The Malayalam-speaking areas of Madras were united with
Travancore-Cochin to form a single Malayalam state, Kerala.
Madhya Bharat, Bhopal, and Vindhya Pradesh, three small
Hindi-speaking states, were given to Madhya Pradesh, a large
Hindi state, which, at the same time, lost its southern Marathi
areas to Mumbai (formerly Bombay) state. Many other boundary
changes occurred in this reorganization. Mumbai state originally
was to have been divided into Gujarati and Marathi linguistic
sections but remained as one state largely because of
disagreement over which group was to receive the city of
Mumbai (formerly Bombay). In 1960, however, it, too, was split
into two states, Gujarat and Maharashtra, on the basis of
linguistic boundaries. In 1966, the government of India accepted
the demand of the Punjabi-speaking people, mainly Sikhs, to
divide the bilingual state of Punjab into two unilingual areas,
with the Hindi-speaking area to be known as Haryana and the
Punjabi-speaking area to retain the name of Punjab.
India has almost as many forms of script as it has languages.
Thus, all of the Dravidian and some of the Indo-Aryan languages
have their own distinctive alphabets, which differ greatly in form
and appearance. Some languages, such as Hindi, may be written
in either of two different scripts. Konkani, a dialect of the west
coast, is written in three different scripts in different geographic
areas.
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