The official languages spoken in India are Hindi and English but there are hundreds of other languages and dialects in use around the country.
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Author: Rakhi Bhargava
The official languages spoken in India are Hindi and English. Hindi is the national language of India more popularly known as the official language of India in the Devanagari script. The languages of India belong to several major linguistic families the two largest being the Indo-European languages spoken by 70% and the Dravidian languages spoken by 22% of Indians.
Individual mother tongues in India number to several hundreds. Two contact languages that have played an important role in the history of India: Persian and English.
The Northern Indian languages emerged from the Ind0 European family evolved from old Indo Aryan languages such as Sanskrit which is popularly known as the classical language. There is no consensus for a specific time where the modern north Indian languages such as Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi etc emerged but AD 1000 is the commonly accepted time.Hindi and Urdu languages are closely influenced by the Hindustani languages which in turn derive their essence from Persian.
The Dravidian languages of South India have a history that is independent of Sanskrit. The major Dravidian languages are Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada out of which Tamil is the oldest Language. Tamil derives its essence in history as old as Sanskrit. The languages of North – East also are independent of Sanskrit.
Linguistics generally distinguish the terms language and dialects on the basis of comprehension. The Indian census uses two specific classifications 1. Language and 2. Mother Tongue. The ‘mother tongues’ are grouped within each ‘language’. Many ‘mother tongues’ so defined would be considered a language rather than a dialect by linguistic standards. This is especially so for many ‘mother tongues’ with tens of millions of speakers that is officially grouped under the ‘language’ Hindi.
Hindi is the official language for the states of Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and the National Capital. Bengali is the the official language of West Bengal, Manipur, Tripura and certain other parts of Eastern India. Kannada is the official Language of Karnataka, Tamil is the official Language of TamilNadu Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Puducherry whereas Telugu is the official Language of Andhra Pradesh.Malayalam is the official Language of Kerela and Lakshwadeep.Oriya is spoken in Orissa and some parts of Bengal Chattisgarh and Jharkhand.
Writing Systems: Indian Languages have corresponding distinct alphabets. The two major families are those of Dravidian Languages and Indo Aryan Languages the former largely confined to the north and the latter mainly to the south. Urdu and sometimes Kashmiri are written in Modified versions of Perso Arabic script.Except for these all other alphabets of Indian Languages are native to India.
The languages and the dialects of India clearly show the democracy of India and largely emphasis on our rich culture and Unity in Diversity.
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Comments:
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The Article is very factual.
And almost all the facts mentioned here are very well known. So if the article was supposed to provide a better insight then it does not succeed in doing so. Neither new information, nor any new ideas/thoughts of the writer that may persuade a reader to take a different view on the subject.
The article may be OK but the writing is not really good. Some significant spelling errors as well. Even the word Kerala is spelled wrong. The writer needs a lot of editing.
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