We got an inquiry for a potential project, which has all the
official languages of India included and to quote we had to research a bit for dialects, most spoken languages, community and
places. This gave me an idea to let know, data researchers and big companies know where they should target their next expansion in India.
Official languages of India:
Hindi
|
English
|
Assamese
|
Bengali
|
Bodo
|
Dogri
|
Gujarati
|
Kannada
|
Kashmiri
|
Konkani
|
Maithili
|
Meitei (Manipuri)
|
Malayalam
|
Marathi
|
Nepali
|
Odia
|
Punjabi
|
Sanskrit
|
Santali
|
Sindhi
|
Tamil
|
Telugu
|
Urdu
|
I had an idea about the top few
languages, however, not all of them, but here are
the number of speakers in Indian official languages as per the census language data taken from Wikipedia. (Source: Wikipedia) List of languages by number of native speakers (Ordered by number of speakers as first language)
The
2001 census recorded all the below languages as having more than 1 million
native speakers (0.1% of total population). The languages in list are scheduled languages (the only scheduled language with less than 1 million native speakers is Sanskrit). |
Language
|
2001 census
(total population 1,028,610,328 ) |
1991 census
(total population 838,583,988) |
Encarta 2007
estimate
(worldwide speakers) |
||
Speakers
|
Percentage
|
Speakers
|
Percentage
|
Speakers
|
|
Hindi
|
422,048,642
|
41.1%
|
329,518,087
|
39.29%
|
366 M
|
Bengali
|
83,369,769
|
8.11%
|
69,595,738
|
8.30%
|
207 M
|
Telugu
|
74,002,856
|
7.19%
|
66,017,615
|
7.87%
|
69.7 M
|
Marathi
|
71,936,894
|
6.99%
|
62,481,681
|
7.45%
|
68.0 M
|
Tamil
|
60,793,814
|
5.91%
|
53,006,368
|
6.32%
|
66.0 M
|
Urdu
|
51,536,111
|
5.01%
|
43,406,932
|
5.18%
|
60.3 M
|
Gujarati
|
46,091,617
|
4.48%
|
40,673,814
|
4.85%
|
46.1 M
|
Kannada
|
37,924,011
|
3.69%
|
32,753,676
|
3.91%
|
35.3 M
|
Malayalam
|
33,066,392
|
3.21%
|
30,377,176
|
3.62%
|
35.7 M
|
Odia
|
33,017,446
|
3.21%
|
28,061,313
|
3.35%
|
32.3 M
|
Punjabi
|
29,102,477
|
2.83%
|
23,378,744
|
2.79%
|
57.1 M
|
Assamese
|
13,168,484
|
1.28%
|
13,079,696
|
1.56%
|
15.4 M
|
Maithili
|
12,179,122
|
1.18%
|
7,766,921
|
0.926%
|
24.2 M
|
Santali
|
6,469,600
|
0.63%
|
5,216,325
|
0.622%
|
|
Kashmiri
|
5,527,698
|
0.54%
|
|||
Nepali
|
2,871,749
|
0.28%
|
2,076,645
|
0.248%
|
16.1 M
|
Sindhi
|
2,535,485
|
0.25%
|
2,122,848
|
0.253%
|
19.7 M
|
Konkani
|
2,489,015
|
0.24%
|
1,760,607
|
0.210%
|
|
Dogri
|
2,282,589
|
0.22%
|
|||
Manipuri
|
1,466,705*
|
0.14%
|
1,270,216
|
0.151%
|
|
Bodo
|
1,350,478
|
0.13%
|
1,221,881
|
0.146%
|
|
The top language Hindi is the most widely spoken language in Northern parts
of
India. According to 2001 Census even though 45% of Indian population know Hindi, only 25% of them have declared Hindi as their native language or mother tongue. Indian English is recorded as the native language of 226,449 Indians in the 2001 Census. Seeing the trend of growth rate in Census language data from 1991 to 2001 we are expecting to have some similar growth rate in next census data of 2011 which is still pending to publish. |
