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Languages of India

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"Indian languages" redirects here. For languages of Native Americans, see Indigenous languages of the Americas.

The languages of India primarily belong to two major linguistic families, Indo-European (whose branch Indo-Aryan is spoken by about 75% of the population) and Dravidian (spoken by about 25%). Other languages spoken in India come mainly from the Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman linguistic families, as well as a few language isolates.[1]

Map of South Asia in native languages.

Individual mother tongues in India number several hundred[2] (SIL Ethnologue lists 415), and 24 languages are spoken by more than a million native speakers, 114 by more than 10,000.

Three millennia of language contact situations have led to a lot of mutual influence among the four language families in India and South Asia. Two contact languages have played an important role in the history of India: Persian and English.[3]

History

Main article: Linguistic history of India
A bazaar in Andhra Pradesh with signs, from left to right, in Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, and English.
Language families in South Asia

The northern Indian languages from the Calestini 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, Punjabi, and Bengali emerged, but CE 1000 is commonly accepted.[4] Each language had different influences, with Hindi/Urdu and closely related languages being strongly influenced by Persian and Arabic. The South Indian (Dravidian) languages had a history independent of Sanskrit. However in later stages all the Dravidian languages had been heavily influenced by Sanskrit. The major Dravidian languages are Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam.

Language families

The languages of India may be grouped by major language families. The largest of these in terms of speakers is the Indo-European family, predominantly represented in its Indo-Aryan branch (accounting for some 700 million speakers), but also including minority languages such as Persian, Portuguese or French, and English as lingua franca. The second largest is the Dravidian family, accounting for some 200 million speakers. Minor linguistic families include the Munda and Tibeto-Burman families (with some 9 and 6 million speakers, respectively). There is also a language isolate, the Nihali language.

Classical languages of India

Academic sources have long recognised that some of the languages native to India are rightly regarded as "classical". As far back as the middle of the 19th century, Indologists referred to Paninian Sanskrit as "classical Sanskrit", distinguishing it from the older Vedic language.[5][6][7] Robert Caldwell, the first linguist to systematically study the Dravidian languages as a family, used the term "classical" to distinguish the literary forms of Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam from the diglossic colloquial forms.[8] In the second half of the 20th century, academics began to suggest that the Old Tamil poems of the Sangam anthologies were also "classical" in the sense that they shared many features with literatures commonly accepted as classical. This point, first made by Kamil Zvelebil in the 1970s,[9] has since been supported by a number of other scholars,[10][11][12] and the terminology "classical Tamil" is commonly used in historical literature to refer to texts from that period.[13] Martha Ann Selby argues that if classicality is defined with reference to age and the value a literature has within the tradition it represents, the Tamil poetry of the Sangam anthologies and the Maharashtri poems of the Sattisai are "classical", in addition to Sanskrit literature.[14]

In 2004, a new category was created by constitutional decree under which languages that met certain requirements could be accorded the status of a 'classical' in India.[15] With the creation of this category, Tamil and a year later, Sanskrit have been accorded the status. More languages are being considered to be added to the list.[15] The experts consulted by the government and the Sahitya Akademi of India, a literary body, recommended against awarding the tag to any language.[16]

Official Languages

Main article: Official languages of India

Article 346 of the Indian Constitution recognises Hindi in Devanāgarī script as the official language of central government India. The Constitution also allows for the continuation of use of the English language for official purposes. Article 345 provides constitutional recognition to "Official languages" of the union to include any language adopted by a state legislature as the official language of that state. In effect, there are "Official Languages at the state and center level but no one "national language". 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 [17]. Individual states, whose borders are mostly drawn on socio-linguistic lines, are free to decide their own language for internal administration and education. In 2004, the government elevated Tamil.[18][19][20] to the newly created official status of "Classical Language", followed by Sanskrit[21] in 2005. The Constitution of India recognises 22 languages, spoken in different parts 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 is the official language of the states of 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 each of the several states mentioned above may also have another co-official language.

Writing systems

Main articles: Indic scripts and Nasta'liq script

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. Most scholars consider these Indic scripts a distant offshoot of the Aramaic alphabet, although there are differing opinions.

Romanization

Main articles: ISO 15919 and National Library at Kolkata romanization
unvoiced consonants voiced consonants nasals
unaspirated aspirated unaspirated aspirated
velar plosives k kh g gh ṅ
palatal affricates c ch j jh ñ
retroflex plosives ṭ ṭh ḍ ḍh ṇ
dental plosives t th d dh n
bilabial plosives p ph b bh m
glides and approximants y r l v
fricatives ś ṣ s h

Inventories

The Indian census of 1961 recognised 1,652 different languages in India (including languages not native to the subcontinent). The 1991 census recognizes 1,576 classified "mother tongues"[3] SIL Ethnologue lists 415 living "Languages of India" (out of 6,912 worldwide).

According to the 1991 census, 22 languages have more than a million native speakers, 50 have more than 100,000 and 114 have more than 10,000 native speakers. The remaining account for a total of 566,000 native speakers (out of a total of 838 million Indians in 1991).[4]

The largest language that is not one of the 22 "languages of the 8th Schedule" with official status is the Bhili language with some 5.5 million native speakers (ranked 13th), followed by Gondi (15th), Tulu (19th) and Kurukh (20th). On the other hand, 3 languages with fewer than 1 million native speakers are included in the 8th Schedule for cultural or political reasons: English (40th), Dogri (54th) and Sanskrit (67th).

See

Footnotes and References

  1. ^ see: Nihali language, Burushaski language, Andamanese languages
  2. ^ More than a thousand including major dialects. The 1991 census recognized "1576 rationalized mother tongues" which were further grouped into language categories [1]; the 1961 census recognized 1,652 [2].
  3. ^ Bhatia, Tej K and William C. Ritchie. (2006) Bilingualism in South Asia. In: Handbook of Bilingualism, pp. 780-807. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
  4. ^ Shapiro, M: Hindi.
  5. ^ Whitney, William D. (1854). "On the History of the Vedic Texts". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 4: 245–261. at p. 259.
  6. ^ Whitney, William D. (1853). "On the Main Results of the Later Vedic Researches in Germany". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 3: 289–328. at p. 296.
  7. ^ Prichard, James Cowles (1850). "Anniversary Address for 1848, to the Ethnological Society of London on the Recent Progress of Ethnology". Journal of the Ethnological Society of London. 2: 119–149. at p. 139.
  8. ^ Caldwell, Robert (1998) [1913]. A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Or South-Indian Family of Languages (Second AES reprint ed.). New Delhi: Asian Educational Services. pp. 30, 78–81. ISBN 8120601173.
  9. ^ Zvelebil, Kamil (1975). Tamil Literature. Leiden: E.J. Brill. pp. 5–21, 50–53. ISBN 9004041907. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |chapterurl= (help)
  10. ^ Takahashi, Takanobu (1995). Tamil Love Poetry and Poetics. Brill's Indological Library. Leiden: E.J. Brill. p. 2. ISBN 9004100423.
  11. ^ Ramanujan, A.K. (1985). Poems of Love and War from the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil. UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. ix. ISBN 0231051069.
  12. ^ Annamalai, E.; Steever, S.B. (1998), "Modern Tamil", in Steever, Sanford B. (ed.), The Dravidian Languages, London: Routledge, pp. pp. 100-128, ISBN 0415100232 {{citation}}: |pages= has extra text (help) at p. 100.
  13. ^ See e.g. Stein, Burton (1977). "Circulation and the Historical Geography of Tamil Country". The Journal of Asian Studies. 37: 7–261. at p. 12; Maloney, Clarence (1970). "The Beginnings of Civilization in South India". The Journal of Asian Studies. 29 (3): 603–616. at p. 605.
  14. ^ Selby, Martha Ann (2000). Grow long, Blessed Night: Love Poems from Classical India. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 3–4. ISBN 019512734X..
  15. ^ a b "India sets up classical languages". BBC. Retrieved 2007-05-01.
  16. ^ "Classic case of politics of language". The Telegraph. Retrieved 2007-04-20. ...The government has declared Tamil a classical language despite the objections of experts it consulted and after a committee it had appointed refused to recommend it....The Sahitya Akademi office bearers wrote a second time. In essence, they repeated that it was not the government's business to declare a language classical. It is a classically foolish move, a source said....
  17. ^ "Legislation: Legislation dealing with the use of languages". Constitution of India. Articles 29, 30, 120, 210, 343-351 as amended in the 21st and 71st Amendments.
  18. ^ Item 41 of President Kalam's address to a joint sitting of both houses of Indian Parliament
  19. ^ BBC news item on the formal approval by the Indian Cabinet
  20. ^ "Tamil as a classic language: Report to Central Government by Tamil Nadu Government", report submitted by Tamil Nadu State Government to Central Government of India to claim the Classic Language status.
  21. ^ News item that appeared in "The Hindu" on the Cabinet decision to declare Sanskrit as a classical language.

See also

External links

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