The Indian Languages Spread - Evolving Opportunity

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.

India has 23 constitutionally recognized official languages, written in 13 different scripts, with over 720 dialects. The official Indian languages is Hindi (with approximately 422 million speakers)

 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.