How Many Languages Are Spoken in India – Learn about the National Language and List of Indian Languages

The Census of India 2011 Report says that people in India speak 121 languages and 270 mother tongues. The 8th Schedule of the Indian Constitution says that 22 of the country’s 121 languages are recognised.

Hindi is one of India’s official languages and 52.83 crore people can speak it. In other words, 43.63 per cent of the world’s population can speak Hindi. After it, Bengali and Marathi are the second and third most spoken languages, respectively.

India is home to a lot of different language families and groups. Only Namibia has more languages than this country. People who want to take the different tests must know the top 10 languages in India by number. Even though Hindi is the most common language, Bengali and Marathi are not far behind. Based on how many people speak them, the full list of the 10 most-spoken languages in India is given below.

Official Language Spoken in India

Most people in India speak Hindi as their main language. Hindi is spoken and understood by people from many parts of the land. It is the main language people speak in the middle and north of India. But you should remember that India is a very different place with many different languages.

Along with Hindi and a few other languages, the Indian government recognises English as one of the main languages. English is often used in business and government, and many townspeople can speak both Hindi and English well. India has a long and rich cultural past; its many languages show that. They also help spread the idea that there is strength in diversity.

Scheduled Languages in India

India talks and writes in a lot of different languages. Language is an important part of a culture, especially in a place like India, where many languages and cultures exist.

As their first tongue, 96.7% of the people in India speak one of the Scheduled languages. One of the other languages is spoken by the other 3.29 per cent.

There are two groups of 121 languages:

Part A: The 22 official languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India (Scheduled Languages); and

Part B: Languages not on the Eighth Schedule (Non-Scheduled Languages), which includes 99 languages and the group “Total of other languages,” which includes all other languages and mother tongues in Part B that had less than 10,000 speakers at a given time.

English is one of the Major languages.

Because of history, English is India’s second language. When the British ran the country, the law was written in English. India got its independence, but the language stayed, and that has stayed the same over time.

With more than a billion English speakers, India is the second-largest English-speaking country after the United States. Most work, school, and government papers in India are written in English.

A List of Indian Languages

A big part of speaking a language is talking out loud. If people didn’t understand the same language, they couldn’t live together or work as a team. But languages in different parts of the world can be very different. In some places, there are many different ways to speak the language. One of these places is India. India has over a billion people from many places, countries, and religions. This country has more languages than any other country in the world.

Hindi

The majority of people in India speak Hindi. It is one of the languages that people can speak in the country. According to the 2011 Indian Census, Hindi is spoken by 52.83 crore people or 43.63% of the country’s population. Even though these tests require an English paper, Hindi is also used as a second language on tests to hire people for many important federal government jobs, colleges, and banks.

Bengali

Bengali is the second most spoken language in India after Hindi. It has 9.72 crore people. 8.03 per cent of the people speak Bengali. This language is spoken in many ways, especially in how words are said and written. Bengali is spoken mostly in the Indian states of West Bengal, Jharkhand, Assam, and Tripura, all of which are in the east. People in the United States, Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the Middle East also speak this language.

Marathi

Marathi is the language that most people in India speak. People who live in Maharashtra and Goa speak it. It is part of the Indo-Aryan family of languages. 8.30 crore people in the whole country can speak Marathi. This is 6.86% of the world’s population.

Marathi is an Indo-Aryan language. It is the national language of Goa and Maharashtra, two states in western India.

Telugu

Telugu is another widely used language that 6.7% of people can speak. Hindi and Bengali have been made the official languages of more than one state. Telugu is spoken by about 8.11 billion people in India right now. People say Telugu is growing the fastest because many people who know it have moved to the US.

Tamil

The Tamil language comes from the Dravidian language family. Even though it is the official language of both Singapore and Sri Lanka, many people in India also speak it. Most Tamil speakers live in southern India, near Sri Lanka’s coast. Tamil is thought to be one of the world’s oldest still-spoken languages. More than 2,000 years ago, people wrote about it.

Gujarati

Gujarati is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by 5.54 million Indians. This is the national language of the northwest Indian state of Gujarat. Sanskrit was the language that Gujarati came from.

Urdu

About 5.07 billion people speak Urdu in India. Urdu is also one of the country’s national languages. It is an official language in West Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Telangana, and Jharkhand. Pakistan also has Urdu as one of its official languages.

Kannada

Kannada, like Tamil, is a Dravidian language. 4.37 billion people in India speak this language. Kannada is one of the world’s oldest living languages. This language is spoken in India, as well as in Australia, the United States, and Canada. A lot of them come from the Indian Diaspora. People think Kannada is made up of more than 20 languages.

Odia

Odia is India’s official language, and most people who speak it live in Odisha. 3.75 million people speak this language in the country. Odia is spoken by about 3.10 per cent of the world’s population.

Malayalam

About 3.48 crore people in India speak Malayalam. The states of Kerala, Puducherry, and Lakshadweep are where most of these people live. The Dravidian language is also where the roots of this language can be found.

Punjabi

The Indian states of Punjab and Chandigarh use Punjabi as their main language. It is India’s eighth most spoken language. A lot of people in the Punjabi state speak it. There are 3.31 billion people who know this language. It’s a big surprise that Punjabi is the third most spoken language in the UK and Canada.

Interesting Facts about the Language of India

• Hindi is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. A lot also speaks Bengali of people around the world.
• India doesn’t have a main language. After they got their freedom, there were so many different languages that it was hard to choose just one.
• A lot of the words we use in English come from India. Some examples include dungarees, avatar, jungle, tank, shampoo, roti, boat, chutney, and mongoose.
• Telugu is a language spoken in India. People sometimes call it the “Italian of the East”.
• Hindi comes from the Persian word Hind, which means “country of the Indus River”.
• Hindi is linked to Sanskrit, Urdu, Nepalese, Bengali, and Gujarati in some way, either in how they sound or are written.
• Malayalam is the longest palindrome in the English language. It is spoken in the southern Indian state of Kerala.