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India is a land of a
variety of linguistic communities, each of which share a common
language and culture. Though there could be fifteen principal
languages there are hundreds of thousands dialects that add to the
vividness of the country.
18 languages are officially recognized in India of which Sanskrit
and Tamil share a long history of more than 5,000 and 3,000 years
respectively. The population of people speaking each language varies
drastically. For example Hindi has 250 million speakers, while
Andamanese is spoken by relatively fewer people.
Tribal or Aboriginal language speaking population in India may be
more than some of the European languages. For instance Bhili and
Santali both tribal languages have more than 4 million speakers. The
vividness can be ascertained by the fact that schools in India teach
more than 50 different languages; there are Films in 15 languages,
Newspapers in 90 or more languages and radio programmes in 71
languages!
Indian languages come from four distinct families, which are:
Indo-European, Dravidian, Mon-Khmer, and Sino-Tibetan. Majority of
Indian population uses Indo-European and Dravidian languages. The
language families divide India geographically too.
Indo-European languages dominate the northern and central India
while in south India; mainly languages of Dravidian origin are
spoken. In eastern India languages of Mon-Khmer group is popular.
Sino Tibetan languages are spoken in the northern Himalayas and
close to Burmese border. In terms of percentage, 75% of Indian
population speaks languages of Indo-European family, 23% speak
languages of Dravidian origin and about 2% of the population speaks
Mon-Khmer languages and Sino-Tibetan languages.
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