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Roughly 900 languages are spoken in South Asia (including Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka). Hindi and Urdu (national languages of India and Pakistan) are considered by linguists to be two varieties of one language, but thought of by speakers as different languages. Why? One language known as Hindi, Hindvi, Zubaan-e Urdu-e Mualla,
In the 2011 Census, Urdu language is a composite of mother tongues Urdu, Bhansuri and Others (this includes many more unlisted mother tongues). Here it may be recalled that Hindi too is one
Hindustani, later known as a variety of Hindi and Urdu, is not commonly spoken across all of India, and it is considered a northern Indian regional language since it is distinct from the language families and scripts used in south India.
- Hindi Is Exploding
- Proportion of South Indian Language Speakers Falling
- Hindi Is Growing Even in South India
- Urdu Numbers Falling
- Bengali Spreading to South, West
- Assam’s Language Divide
- More Indians Are Speaking English
- Wild Cards: Sanskrit, Arabic and Pashto
Hindi is India’s most spoken language. It is one of two languages used by the Union government (the other being English). As a mother tongue, Hindi is found mainly in North India and Central India, although there are significant urban pockets of Hindi speakers in most states of the Union. Currently, nearly 44% of India speaks Hindi (this figure, ho...
While high population growth in North India has helped Hindi surge, lower population growth in the five Dravidian language-speaking states – Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana – has resulted in the proportion of Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam falling. While Hindi grew by 161% between 1971 and 2011, for example, the fo...
In addition, growing migration from north to south has meant a greater presence of Hindi in the five southern states. In Tamil Nadu, for example, the proportion of Hindi speakers nearly doubled from 2001 to 2011. In some cases, like in Karnataka’s capital Bengaluru, this north to south migration has caused political ripples and resulted in an agita...
Only two scheduled languages have seen a fall in absolute numbers, Urdu and Konkani. There are 5,07,72,631 Urdu speakers in India, a fall of about 1.5% since 2001. Urdu speakers are spread across India but the language’s strongest presence is in the modern-day Hindi belt: the two largest Urdu-speaking states are Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. However, it...
As Hindi spreads to other states with migration, so does Bengali. While states bordering West Bengal and Bangladesh have always had a significant Bengali population, the 2011 census counted 4.4 lakh Bengalis in far-off Maharashtra and 2.2 lakh in Delhi. While numbers are small in the south, they are growing. In Kerala, the proportion of Bengali spe...
The sharpest linguistic divide in India possibly exists in Assam, where the National Register of Citizens – a project that aims to create a definitive list of citizens of the state and identify illegal immigrants – and a proposed citizenship law has dividedthe state’s Assamese and Bengali speakers. Assam is no stranger to linguistic conflict, a pat...
A carry over from the British Raj, English is the link-language between India’s various states and the language of its upper crust elite. However, in absolute numbers, there are a tiny number of people who speak the language as a mother tongue, with only the Anglo-Indian community historically identifying with it. In spite of that, English seems to...
Sanskrit is India’s smallest official language with 24,821 speakers. However, Arabic – with no official status – is double its size with 54,947 speakers. Since neither language has any active speakers in India, these numbers probably represent people who misreported their mother tongue given the high status Sanskrit and Arabic enjoy as liturgical t...
URDU IN INDIA TO 1947 Speaking from a historical and not a literary or linguistic point of view, three key points stand out in the modern history of the Urdu language. First, in the eighteenth century, Urdu emerged as a highly developed language of poetry, above all in the cities of Delhi and Lucknow.2 A great deal of historical work in recent ...
May 4, 2010 · It is spoken by more than two hundred million people either as a first or second language in India, and by peoples of Indian origin in Trinidad, Guyana, Fiji, Mauritius, South Africa, and many other countries. It is the official language of India, and English is the associate official language.
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States of India by Urdu speakers. As per Government of India census data of 2011, the total number of Urdu speakers in the Republic of India were 62,772,631. [1][2] According to the census guidelines, "Urdu" does not broadly refer to the Hindustani language, but the literary- register of the macrolanguage, hence accounting Hindi as a separate ...
