India, Languages of. The people of India speak nearly 400 languages, as well as many dialects that are mostly varieties of about 15 principal languages. Some Indian languages have a long literary history. Sanskrit literature is over 3,000 years old, and Tamil is 2,000 years old. India also has some languages that have no written forms.
The number of people that speak each language varies greatly. According to the census of India, Hindi has hundreds of millions of native speakers. However, this group includes several other languages, some of which have many speakers and major status.
Language and society
Official languages.
Hindi is the official national language of India. It is the native language of more than one-third of India’s people, and many others speak it as a second language. The Constitution of India also specifies 21 other official languages: Assamese (Asamiya), Bengali (Bangla), Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi (Panjabi), Sanskrit, Santali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. English has an official status as an associate national language. Only a small percentage of India’s people speak English as their native language. However, English is a common language among educated people across India. Much of the nation’s official business is conducted in English. Some colleges and universities in India also teach in English.
Organization by states.
Many states have a predominance of one language. The government tends to recognize states according to their languages. In 1960, the government divided the state of Bombay into two new states, Gujarat and Maharashtra. In 1966, two states were formed from Punjab (Panjab) because of language differences. The states are Punjab (Panjab), where the majority of the people speak Punjabi (Panjabi), and Haryana, where the majority speak Hindi. Several minority groups in northeastern India also have their own states. In 2000, the Indian government created three new states—Uttaranchal (now Uttarakhand), Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand—from areas that differed in culture or in the language spoken from the states to which they formerly belonged.
Each state has an official language. A state may have more than one official language, with each language serving a specifically designated purpose or being used in a certain region. Each state also has speakers of minority languages. The number of speakers of minority languages varies greatly from state to state.
Government policy and language conflict.
The Indian government at times has tried to promote Hindi as a national language. However, many Indians who do not speak Hindi oppose making it the nation’s only official language. They claim that the best jobs in government would go to those who speak Hindi. In addition, most Indians take pride in their regional languages, many of which have old and honored literatures and express a rich cultural heritage. Many Indians fear that this heritage would become lost if everyone spoke Hindi. In response to these concerns, the Indian government now recognizes many regional languages as official languages.
For many years, there have been divisions, sometimes leading to violent confrontations, over the official language. One division concerns the relative positions of Hindi and the regional languages, some of which are spoken by tens of millions of people. A related question is the status of English. Supporters of Hindi as an official language mostly oppose the use of English. But supporters of the regional languages look to English as an alternative link between the Indian states.
Education.
Children in primary and secondary schools study in their regional languages. By the end of 10 years of school, a student normally has learned three languages, two of which are Hindi and English. The third language is usually the official language of the state, the mother tongue of the student, or a classical language, such as Sanskrit.
Classification of India’s languages
The languages of India belong to four language families (groups of languages that are related because they all developed from a single earlier language). The four families are (1) Mon-Khmer (sometimes called Austro-Asiatic), (2) Dravidian, (3) Indo-European, and (4) Sino-Tibetan. The Indo-European languages of India belong to the group called Indo-Aryan. A large majority of India’s population uses Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages.
The language families divide roughly into geographic groups. People of the northern and central regions speak languages that belong to the Indo-Aryan group. The languages of southern India are mainly of the Dravidian group. Mon-Khmer languages are spoken in parts of central and northeastern India. Sino-Tibetan languages are found in the extreme north and northeast.
People who speak different languages of the Indo-Aryan group make up about 75 percent of India’s population. About 20 percent of the people speak Dravidian languages. Speakers of Mon-Khmer languages and Sino-Tibetan languages together make up only about 2 percent of the population.
Indo-Aryan languages.
The main Indo-Aryan languages to evolve from the regional native languages are Assamese (Asimiya), Bengali (Bangla), Gujarati, Hindi, Kashmiri, Konkani, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi (Panjabi), and Sindhi. These languages began to emerge in northern India after A.D. 1000. As they evolved, they borrowed words from Sanskrit and from Persian, one of the languages of the Mughal Empire that ruled India from the 1500’s to the 1700’s. Through Persian, Indian languages also took words from Arabic. In addition, modern Indo-Aryan languages have borrowed many words from English and other European languages.
These northern Indian languages are now major regional languages, each spoken by several million people. Bengali (Bangla) is the national language of Bangladesh and the language of the Indian state of West Bengal. Nepali is the official language of Nepal. Modern Hindi, which is based on a Delhi dialect but borrows many words from Sanskrit, is India’s majority language. Hindi’s sister language, Urdu, has basically the same grammar but borrows many words from Persian and Arabic. Urdu is the national language of Pakistan. Hindi is traditionally written in the Devanagari script (from Sanskrit), and Urdu is written in Arabic script.
Dravidian languages.
The languages of southern India belong to the Dravidian family. Speakers of Dravidian languages also group together in parts of India where northern languages predominate.
The Dravidian languages form a completely separate group from the Indo-European languages, although they also have borrowed many words from Sanskrit. The four main Dravidian languages are Kannada (also called Kanarese), Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu. These languages are four of India’s official languages. Tamil is the official language of Tamil Nadu; Telugu is the language of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana; Kannada is the language of Karnataka; and Malayalam is the language of Kerala.
Dravidians have lived in the area for at least 4,500 years, and Dravidian languages have a recorded history of more than 2,000 years. Speakers of Dravidian languages feel a strong sense of cultural unity.
Scripts and sounds in Indian languages
The languages of South Asia share many features of pronunciation. An important example is the distinction between a group of sounds called dental sounds and another group of sounds called retroflex sounds. A speaker makes dental sounds with the tip of the tongue against the top front teeth. Retroflex sounds are made with the tongue curling back so that its tip hits behind and above the front teeth.
Another feature is the use of distinct consonants pronounced with and without a release of breath. Consonants pronounced with a release of breath are called aspirated consonants. Consonants pronounced without a release of breath are called unaspirated consonants. For example, the Hindi words dang (meaning astonishment or fear) and Dhang (meaning method) begin with dental unaspirated d and retroflex aspirated Dh. The official name of India, Bharat, begins with aspirated bh. In the Roman alphabet, adding an h shows aspiration.
There are many different ways of writing Indian languages. Most of these written forms, called scripts, come from an ancient Indian script called Brahmi, which first appears in the inscriptions of the Mauryan ruler Ashoka in the 200’s B.C. Most regional languages have their own script, which helps give each region a sense of its own identity. Scripts that come from Brahmi run from left to right. There is no equivalent to capital letters. The script now usually used for Sanskrit in northern India, which is called Devanagari or Nagari, is also used for Hindi, Konkani, Marathi, and Nepali.
The Roman script used for European languages has individual letters as its basic units. In Indian scripts, there are signs for individual vowels, but consonant symbols by themselves stand for a consonant with the vowel a. Other vowel symbols are added to make signs for consonants with these vowels. The numerals in Indian scripts are the origin of the Arabic numerals used in European writing systems. The Arabs borrowed Hindu numerals from Indian script, and then the Europeans borrowed their numerals from Arabic.
The scripts used for most northern Indian languages are closely related to Devanagari. South Indian scripts generally have a much rounder shape, although they also come from Brahmi. Urdu uses the Perso-Arabic script introduced by the Turks and Afghans. Other Indian languages, such as Kashmiri and Sindhi, also use this script. It runs from right to left. It has been slightly modified to accommodate some Indian sounds. Some Indian languages, such as Konkani, also use the Roman script as an alternative form of writing.
The development of the Indian languages
Indo-Aryan languages.
Language experts have traced three main stages in the development of Indo-Aryan languages: Old, Middle, and Modern Indo-Aryan. Migrant people who came to northern India from regions farther northwest sometime before 1000 B.C. spoke Old Indo-Aryan dialects. The language of this first stage was called Sanskrit. The name Sanskrit means refined or polished. See Sanskrit language .
Vedic and classical Sanskrit.
An old variety of Sanskrit, called Vedic or Vedic Sanskrit, had some forms that do not appear in later Sanskrit. In the 400’s B.C., the grammarian Panini wrote a detailed description of Sanskrit as it was used in his time and area, in what is now northwestern India or Pakistan. He also described the older usages found in Vedic texts. See Panini .
Though simpler than Vedic Sanskrit, classical Sanskrit is more complex than most modern languages. It has eight grammatical cases (forms of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives that show their relation to other words). It also has three numbers (noun, adjective, and verb forms that show whether one or more things are meant). These numbers are singular, plural, and dual. There is also an important system of sound alteration, in which a word ending varies according to its neighboring sound. For example, kas (who?) occurs followed by a word beginning with t, such as tatra (there)—kas tatra (Who is there?), but the form ko occurs followed by a word beginning with d (for example, ko ditsati —Who wishes to give?).
Prakrits and Apabhramshas.
The Middle Indo-Aryan languages consist of several languages and dialects that evolved from Old Indo-Aryan. These are called Prakrits, meaning common or natural. Later forms of the Prakrit languages were called apabhramshas, meaning corruptions, referring to their changes from the original Sanskrit. The term Apabhramshas was then used for the late Middle Indo-Aryan languages.
The earliest Prakrit inscriptions are those of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, in the middle 200’s B.C. An important Prakrit is Pali, the language of texts in Theravada Buddhism, a school of Buddhism that developed in Southeast Asia (see Buddhism (The Theravada) ). Other Prakrits are represented in literary works and inscriptions. Literary works in the Apabhramshas date from around A.D. 1000. Modern Indo-Aryan languages developed from these late Prakrits.
