More than 19,500 mother tongues spoken in India: Census | Total Languages in India
How many languages are there in India?
There are 121 languages which are spoken by 10,000 or more people in India, which has a population of 121 crores, the report said.
However, 96.71 percent population in the country have one of the 22 scheduled languages as their mother tongue.
More than 19,500 languages or dialects are spoken in India
as mother tongues, according to the latest analysis of a census released this
week.
There are 121 languages which are spoken by 10,000 or more
people in India, which has a population of 121 crores, it said.
The Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India, said since a household may consist of persons related by blood or of unrelated persons or a mix of both, it is absolutely necessary to ask every person about her or his mother tongue.
It was required because the mother tongue of each member of
a household need not necessarily be the same — these may be different for
different members of the household.
The number of such raw returns of mother tongues has
totaled 19,569, the report of the 2011 census said. However, 96.71 percent
population in the country has one of the 22 scheduled languages as their
mother tongue.
Since mother tongues, as returned in the census, are
basically, the designations provided by the respondents of the linguistic
mediums in which the respondents think they communicate, they need not be
identical with the actual linguistic mediums, it said.
For assessing the correlation between the mother tongue and
designations of the census and for presenting the numerous raw returns in terms
of their linguistic affiliation to actual languages and dialects, 19,569 raw
returns were subjected to thorough linguistic scrutiny, edit and
rationalization.
This resulted in 1,369 rationalized mother tongues and 1,474
names which were treated as “unclassified” and relegated to “other” mother
tongue category.
The 1,369 rationalized mother tongues were further
classified following the usual linguistic methods for rational grouping based
on the available linguistic information. Thus, an inventory of classified
mother tongues returned by 10,000 or more speakers are grouped under
appropriate languages at the all-India level, wherever possible, has been
prepared for the final presentation of the 2011 mother tongue data.
The total number of languages arrived at is 121, the
Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India, said.
The 121 languages are presented in two parts — languages
included in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, comprising 22
languages and languages not included in the Eighth Schedule, comprising of 99
languages plus the category “total of other languages”, which includes all
other languages and mother tongues which returned less than 10,000 speakers
each at the all-India level or were not identifiable on the basis of the
linguistic information available.
The number of scheduled languages was 22 at the time of the presentation of 2001. The same 22 languages are maintained in the 2011 census
also.
The non-scheduled languages are 99 in 2011 against 100 in
2001. The decrease in the number is due to exclusion of Simte and Persian,
which were not returned in sufficient numbers as 2011, and inclusion of Mao,
which has returned more than 10,000 speakers at the all-India level at 2011
census.
Of the total population of India, 96.71 percent have one of
the scheduled languages as their mother tongue, the remaining 3.29 percent is
accounted for other languages.
There are a total of 270 identifiable mother tongues which have
returned 10,000 or more speakers each at the all-India level, comprising 123
mother tongues grouped under the scheduled languages and 147 mother tongues
grouped under the non-scheduled languages.
Those mother tongues which have returned less than 10,000
speakers each and which have been classified under a particular language, are
included in “others” under that language.
The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution consists of the
following 22 languages –Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri,
Konkani, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit,
Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Bodo, Santhali, Maithili, and Dogri.
Of these languages, 14 were initially included in the
Constitution. The Sindhi language was added in 1967. Thereafter three more
languages viz., Konkani, Manipuri, and Nepali were included in 1992.
Subsequently, Bodo, Dogri, Maithili, and Santhali were added in 2004.
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