The article describes the languages spoken in the Republic of India. For information on languages spoken by the native peoples of North, Central or South America, see Native American languages.

India is rich in languages, boasting not only the indigenous sprouting of Dravidian and Indo-Aryan tongues, but of the absorption of Middle-Eastern and European influences as well. Distinct, often ancient, and rich literary traditions are to be found in several languages.

The languages of India

While 22 major languages are recognized as "Official Languages" by the Constitution of India, Hindi, in the Devanagari script, is often wrongly assumed by many people in India to be the only national language of the federal government of India. While Hindi has been adopted along with English as the official language of the central government, no special status is bestowed on either Hindi or any other language as the sole 'national' language of India.

Individual states, whose borders are mostly drawn on socio-linguistic lines, are free to decide their own language for internal administration and education, so there are 22 official languages spoken throughout the country. Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu, are among the official languages which are widely spoken.

Sanskrit and Prakrit along with Tamil are the classical languages of India. Telugu (తెలుగు), a mellifluous language also known as 'Italian of the East', is another language with a notably ancient history and body of literature, and is widely used in Carnatic music. An official language, and the main language of Hindu liturgy, Sanskrit is also very much a living language. It is spoken tongue in the village of Matthoor, in the Shimoga district of Karnataka. It is also used in rituals and ceremonies or as part of daily prayers in Hinduism.

In all, there are 24 languages which are spoken by a million or more people, in addition to thousands of smaller languages. Besides the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, there are many Tibeto-Burman and Austro-Asiatic languages spoken in India, among others. The Andamanese

Alphabets of Indian languages

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. With the exception of Urdu the alphabets of all these languages are native to India. There are those scholars who believe the scripts of the Northern languages (like Sanskrit, Bengali, Hindi and Punjabi) to be distant derivations of the Aramaic alphabet, though this is a disputed theory primarily because the number and grouping of sounds and letters are so radically different.

Phonetic alphabet

A remarkable feature of the alphabets of India is the manner in which they are organised. It is organised according to phonetic principle, unlike the Roman alphabet, which has a random sequence of letters.

The classification is as follows

This classification is observed in all the languages under discussion. Additionally each language has a few special letters signifying soundsspecific to that language, as also a few symbols representing compositesounds.

Finally, the list of vowels is separately specified, as follows

a, aa, i, ii, u, uu, e, ai, o, au, um, (a)h

Additionally in Vedic Sanskrit: rr, rrr, lrr, lrrr

Note that the list read as pairs represents shorterand longer versions of same vowel. Here the first a is likeu in bus. (a)h is special to Sanskritised words, occurringin word endings as in duhkh(a)h, meaning pain or suffering. It is impossible to say any of the consonants without the associated vowel and the default way of saying a consonant attaches the neutral a sound to it.

In languages of Eastern India like Bangla, Oriya and Assamese, a is spoken almost o.

The classification of these sounds is universal. Every languagein India has a corresponding symbol, and also, with some modifications,the corresponding sound. In fact we may be tempted to think thatall languages at least of the Indo-European family have thecorresponding alphabets, give or take a few, and sometimes give ortake a row or column.

For instance, English has

For nasals, Sanskrit imposes considerable systematics. The abovescheme records that the nasal occurring in conjunction with any givenrow has a sound characteristic that row. For instance the nasalisationoccurring in the word "Ganga" is that of the first row, while thenasalisation occurring in the words "India" or "integral" are character-istically front palatals. Speakers of any language have to necessarilyspeak in this manner though they never realise it.

The classification of the "vowel generated" may seem rathercurious. The belief here is that y sound arises from conjunctionof ii with a, w sound arises from trying to say u (as in put) oruu in conjunction with a. Old Sanskrit of the Hindu Rig Veda has two more vowels, rr and lrr, as also their corresponding longer versions.It is likely that the rr was guttural like the French r, moreakin to a vowel than a consonant. The lrr remains a mystery forbeing classified a vowel. But this classificationthen explains r (as in run) and l (as in long) simply as conjunctionof these vowels with the a sound.

The economy of this classification in the fact that effectivelyeach of the five main rows is generated by one letter,the others are systmeatic modifications of the same. In Tamil, a great simplification of alphabet has beenachieved by having only one symbol for each of the five consonants,the specific hardening and aspiration understood from contextwhile reading. Tamil script indeed spells kathai (story) and gadhai (weapon of Bhima) the same.How ever this simplification can be disadvantaegeous and confusing as illustrated here.The word "foodworld" when written in tamil will appear in roman script as "put(d)world(t)".The "f" will be written as "p", "d" will be written as "t" and the word can be spelt as "pootworlt", "poodworlt" and "poodworld".The vowel "f" is not present in tamil.consequentially this particular word can be spelt in 3 different ways!this is one among the greatest disadvantages,inherent to tamil which will often be forgotten while glorfying its ancientness.The other one is is the space required for writing in comparision with telugu, hindi ,kannada and malayalam.for example when writing the word ENGLISH in tamil there will be 5 characters ('e','in','gi','li,'sh' :written in the shown splitted manner).where as the same will be ( e,in,gli,sh)in all the other mentioned languages.thats is way what is "sir thyagaraja road " in t.nagar area of chennai will be written as "sir thiyagaraja road"

Urdu alphabet

Urdu is unique among Indian languages. Gramatically it is 'genetically' linked to the older language of Prakrit. Much of its vocabulary is derived from neighboring Arabic, Turkish, Farsi and Sanskrit. Indeed, Urdu is the Turkish word for "camp", "tent", or "military encampment". Urdu arose due to contact between the Mughal armies and speakers of the local derivatives of Sanskrit and Prakrit. It has since evolved into a rich independent language. The modern Urdu script evolved from the Arabic script. It was introduced via Persia by invading Mughal armies, and was fitted to the local Indian phonology. Thus, even though Urdu is deeply connected with other Indian languages, and its phonology differes from that of Hindi by only six sounds, its script shows no influence from neighboring Indian alphabets.

List of Indian Languages

There are a large number of languages in India; 216 of them are spoken by a group of 10,000 persons or more.

• List of national languages of India
• List of Indian languages by total speakers

See also

• Languages of Pakistan

Indijos kalbos Talen van India Języki Indii Seznam uradnih jezikov Indije