The languages of India primarily belong to two major linguistic families, Indo-European (whose branch Indo-Aryan is spoken by about 74% of the population) and Dravidian (spoken by about 24%). Other languages spoken in India come from the Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman linguistic families, as well as numerous language isolates. The Andamanese languages, spoken on the Andaman Islands, are apparently not related to any other language family. The number of mother tongues in India is as high as 1,652, of which 24 languages are spoken by a million or more people. Three millennia of language contact situation have led to a lot of 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.[1] Two classical languages native to the land are Sanskrit[2] and Tamil.[3][4][5]
Article 343 of the Indian Constitution recognises Hindi in Dēvanāgari script as the official language of the union [6]; the Constitution also allows for the continuation of use of the English language for official purposes. Article 345 provides constitutional recognition to "national languages" of the union to include any language adopted by a State Legislature as the official language of that state. Until the Twenty-First Amendment of the Constitution in 1967, the country recognised 14 official regional languages. The Eighth Schedule and the Seventy-First Amendment provided for the inclusion of Sindhi, Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali, thereby increasing the number of official regional languages of India to 18 [7]. Individual states, whose borders are mostly drawn on socio-linguistic lines, are free to decide their own language for internal administration and education. The Constitution of India recognises 22 "regional languages", spoken throughout the country, namely Bengali, Assamese, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Meitei, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Hindi, apart from being an official language of the Union of India, is the official language of the states Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttaranchal, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and the National Capital Territory of Delhi. English is the co-official language of the Indian Union, and that each of the several states mentioned above may also have another co-official language.
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