Hindi (Standard Hindi besides many dialects of varying mutual intelligibility) is the most widespread language of India. The Indian census takes the widest possible definition of "Hindi" as a broad variety of "Hindi languages". The native speakers of Hindi so defined accounts for about 40% of Indians.
Indian English is recorded as the native language of 226,449 Indians in the 2001 census. English is the second "language of the Union" besides Hindi.Thirteen languages account for more than 1% of Indian population each, and between themselves for over 95%; all of them are "scheduled languages of the constitution".
Scheduled languages spoken by less than 1% of Indians are Santali (0.64%), Nepali (0.28%), Sindhi (0.25%), Manipuri (0.14%), Bodo (0.13%), Dogri (0.01%, spoken in Jammu and Kashmir). The largest language that is not "scheduled" is Bhili (0.95%), followed by Gondi (0.27%), Tulu (0.17%) and Kurukh (0.098980986%)
India is home to several hundred languages. Most languages spoken in India belong either to the Indo-European 74%), the Dravidian (ca. 24%), the Austroasiatic (Munda) (ca. 1.2%), or the Tibeto-Burman (ca. 0.6%) families, with some languages of the Himalayas still unclassified. The SILEthnologue lists 415 living languages for India.
Monday, April 27, 2009
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