India is an extremely important country and the second most populous country in the world (after China), so a lot of people know the name “India” even if they don’t know much about the people and cultures there. One common question is “What language is spoken in India?” That question can’t be answered with a simple one word answer, because many languages are spoken in India!

 

 

What is India’s official language?

According the constitution of India, there are 2 official languages at the national level: Hindi and English.  English is one of the official languages because India used to be a British colony until 1947. Hindi is the non-colonial language spoken in India by the most people.

In addition to the two official languages at the national level, the national government also recognizes 22 languages as “scheduled languages”. That basically means that those are the languages that the government recognizes for official use in each individual state in India. Different states can choose their own official languages that they use for state business.

How many languages are spoken in India?

This is a little difficult to answer, because it’s not always clear how different two ways of speaking need to be before we classify them as different languages. Sometimes linguists may classify two ways of speaking as dialects of the same language, because they can mostly understand each other, while speakers of those languages themselves consider them different languages.  That’s often because they divide their languages based on village or ethnicity rather than based on language features.

So the numbers in the Indian census are much higher than the numbers usually given by linguists.  The Indian census lists 19,569 language names, but many of these names refer to the same languages. Those names are grouped into 1369 mother tongues. But still,  some of those would be categorized as dialects by linguistic researchers. The census further groups those mother tongues into 121 languages. The problem is that that 121 only includes languages which have more than 10,000 speakers, which excludes hundreds of languages which are only spoken by small numbers of people.  By comparison, Ethnology lists 448 languages, while the People’s Linguistic Survey of India counted 780 languages. Which number is the best? It’s hard to know because it depends on how you define a language, but I tend to use Ethnologue’s number.

If you want to learn more about the languages of India, check out the Langfocus video on the languages of India: