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
History
Hindi speaking regions in India
Main article: Linguistic history of India
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 Apabhraṃśa of the Middle Ages.
There is no consensus for a specific time where the modern north
Indian languages such as Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Saraiki, Punjabi,
Sindhi, Bengali, Oriya and Assamese emerged, but AD 1000 is commonly
accepted.[8] Each language had different influences, with Hindi/Urdu
and closely related Hindustani languages being strongly influenced
by Persian.
The Dravidian languages of South India had a history independent of
Sanskrit. The major Dravidian languages are Tamil, Telugu, Kannada
and Malayalam.[9] A matter of note is that though Dravidian in
origin, around eighty percentage of Malayalam words are taken from
Sanskrit.[10] The Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman languages of
North-East India also have long independent histories.
Inventories
Linguists generally distinguish the terms "language" and "dialects" on the basis of 'mutual comprehension'[dubious ]. The Indian census uses two specific classifications in its own unique way: (1)'language' and (2) 'mother tongue'. The 'mother tongues' are grouped within each 'language'. Many 'mother tongues' so defined would be considered a language rather than a dialect by linguistic standards. This is especially so for many 'mother tongues' with tens of millions of speakers that is officially grouped under the 'language' Hindi.
The Indian census of 1961 recognised 1,652 different languages in India (including languages not native to the subcontinent). The 1991 census recognizes 1,576 classified "mother tongues"[11] SIL Ethnologue lists 415 living "Languages of India" (out of 6,912 worldwide).
According to the 1991 census, 22 'languages' had more than a million native speakers, 50 had more than 100,000 and 114 had more than 10,000 native speakers. The remaining accounted for a total of 566,000 native speakers (out of a total of 838 million Indians in 1991).[11]
According to the most recent census of 2001, 29 'languages' have more than a million native speakers, 60 have more than 100,000 and 122 have more than 10,000 native speakers.
The government of India has given 22 "languages of the 8th Schedule" the status of official language. The number of languages given this status has increased through the political process. Some languages with a large number of speakers still do not have this status, the largest of these being Bhili/Bhiladi with some 9.6 million native speakers (ranked 14th), followed by Gondi with 2.7 million speakers (ranked 18th) and Khandeshi with 2.1 million speakers (ranked 22nd). On the other hand, 2 languages with fewer than 2 million native speakers have recently been included in the 8th Schedule for mostly political reasons: Manipuri/Maithei with 1.5 million speakers (ranked 25th) and Bodo with 1.4 million speakers (ranked 26th). For cultural/historical reasons Sanskrit is on the official schedule, though only 14 thousand people claim it to be their language, but many more study it in school as the classical language of India.
. 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. Kashmiri, and other Dardic languages, which form part of the Indo-Iranian, and arguably Indo-Aryan family, have some 4.6 million speakers in India. The second largest language family 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). The group of Great Andamanese languages are considered to constitute a fifth language family; these languages are highly endangered with dwindling number of speakers. 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 various provices of India.
. Official languages
The official languages of the Republic of India are Hindi and English. According to the article 343 (1), "The Official Language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagari script."[12] 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[13]. Individual states, whose borders are mostly drawn on socio-linguistic lines, are free to decide their own language for internal administration and education.