Languages of India

The essentials

India is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. Its languages belong mainly to four families:

• Indo-Aryan (a branch of Indo-European): Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Odia, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Nepali, Konkani and others; Sanskrit and the Prakrits are its older forms.
• Dravidian: Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, along with languages such as Tulu, Gondi and Kurukh; Brahui, spoken in Pakistan, is also Dravidian.
• Austroasiatic: the Munda languages such as Santali, Mundari and Ho, and the Khasi language of Meghalaya.
• Tibeto-Burman (part of Sino-Tibetan): Manipuri (Meitei), Bodo, and many languages of the north-east and the Himalaya.

Languages of the Andaman Islands form separate groups.

The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution lists 22 languages. Languages of different families have influenced one another for centuries, sharing words and grammatical features; linguists call India a linguistic area.

Many scripts used today, such as Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Odia, Telugu, Kannada, Tamil and Malayalam, descend from the ancient Brahmi script. Urdu is written in a Perso-Arabic script.

Key points

• Largest family by speakers: Indo-Aryan; second: Dravidian.
• Santali is Austroasiatic; Bodo and Manipuri are Tibeto-Burman.
• Most Indian scripts derive from Brahmi.
• Eighth Schedule: 22 languages.

Exam tips

• Practise classifying a given language into its family.

Common mistakes

• Assuming a script and a language are the same thing; one language can use several scripts and one script can serve many languages.
• Putting Santali in the Dravidian family.