Language families
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. Today the Republic of India has about 69% of languages spoken in the country are Indo-Iranian (sub-branch: Indo-Aryan), 26% are Dravidian, and 5% are Sino-Tibetan and Austro-Asiatic, all unrelated/distinct family of languages. Most languages in the Indian republic are written in Brahmi-derived scripts such as Devangari, Gurmukhi, Tamil, etc. Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, Tulu, Tamil, Malayalam, Assamese, Punjabi, Naga, and many others are the mother-tongue languages spoken in each of India's diverse states, alien to each other.
[edit] Official languages
The official languages of the Republic of India are Hindi and English. Article 343(1)states "The Official Language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagari script and English could be also used for official purposes."However, attempts would be made increase the scope of Hindi in official matters on a gradual basis. .[10]
The individual states can legislate their own official languages, depending on their linguistic demographics. For example, the state of TamilNadu has Tamil as its sole official language and the state of Karnataka has Kannada as its sole official language, while the state of Jammu and Kashmir has Kashmiri, Urdu and Dogri as its official languages.
Article 345 of the Indian constitution provides recognition to "official languages" of the union to include any one or more of the languages in use in the state or Hindi language adopted by a state legislature as the official language but, . 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[11]. Individual states, whose borders are mostly drawn on socio-linguistic lines, are free to decide their own language for internal administration and education.
The following table lists the official languages set out in the eighth schedule as of May 2008:[12]
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