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The languages of India primarily belong to two major linguistic families, Indo-European, whose branch Indo-Aryan is spoken by about 70% of the population of India and that includes the Dardic languages; secondly, the Dravidian family (spoken by about 22%). Other languages spoken in India come mainly from the Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman linguistic families; in addition there are a few language isolates.[1] Individual mother tongues in India number several hundred[2]; the 1961 census recognized 1,652[3] (SIL Ethnologue lists 415). According to Census of India of 2001, 29 languages are spoken by more than a million native speakers, 122 by more than 10,000. Three millennia of language contact has led to significant mutual influence among the four language families in India and South Asia. Two contact languages have played an important role in the history of India Persian and English.[4] The northern Indian languages from the Indo-European family evolved from Old Indo-Aryan such as Sanskrit, by way of the Middle Indo-Aryan Prakrit languages and Apabhramsha of the Middle Ages. There is no consensus for a specific time where the modern north Indian languages such as Gujarati Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Bengali and Oriya emerged, but AD 1000 is commonly accepted.[5] Each language had different influences, with Hindi/Urdu and closely related languages being strongly influenced by Persian. The South Indian (Dravidian) languages had a history independent of Sanskrit. However in later stages all the Dravidian languages had been heavily influenced by Sanskrit. The major Dravidian languages are Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. The languages of India may be grouped by major language families. The largest of these in terms of speakers is the Indo-European family, predominantly represented in its Indo-Aryan branch (accounting for some 700 million speakers), but also including minority languages such as Persian, Portuguese or French, and English as lingua franca. The second largest is the Dravidian family, accounting for some 200 million speakers. Minor linguistic families include the Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman families (with some 10 and 6 million speakers, respectively). Kashmiri, considered a Dardic language, has some 4.6 million speakers in India. There is also a language isolate, the Nihali language.
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