Multilingualism in India

The Constitution of India designates the official languages of India as Hindi and English. [1] In India, 255 million people speak at least two languages and 87.5 million speak three or more languages.[2]

Multilingualism

Hindi

Hindi is the one of the official languages of India and had 422 million native speakers as of the 2001 Census. About 98.2 million Indians speak Hindi as a second language and 31.2 million speak it as their third language.[2]

First, Second, and Third languages by number of speakers in India (2001 Census)
Language First language
speakers[3][4]
(% of total population)		 Second language
speakers[4]		 Third language
speakers[4]		 Total speakers[2][4]
(% of total population)[5]
Hindi 422,048,642 (41.03%) 98,207,180 31,160,696 551,416,518 (53.60%)
English 226,449 (0.02%) 86,125,221 38,993,066 125,344,736 (12.18%)
Bengali 83,369,769 (8.11%) 6,637,222 1,108,088 91,115,079 (8.86%)
Telugu 74,002,856 (7.19%) 9,723,626 1,266,019 84,992,501 (8.26%)
Marathi 71,936,894 (6.99%) 9,546,414 2,701,498 84,184,806 (8.18%)
Tamil 60,793,814 (5.91%) 4,992,253 956,335 66,742,402 (6.49%)
Urdu 51,536,111 (5.01%) 6,535,489 1,007,912 59,079,512 (5.74%)
Kannada 37,924,011 (3.69%) 11,455,287 1,396,428 50,775,726 (4.94%)
Gujarati 46,091,617 (4.48%) 3,476,355 703,989 50,271,961 (4.89%)
Odia 33,017,446 (3.21%) 3,272,151 319,525 36,609,122 (3.56%)
Malayalam 33,066,392 (3.21%) 499,188 195,885 33,761,465 (3.28%)
Sanskrit 14,135 (<0.01%) 1,234,931 3,742,223 4,991,289 (0.49%)

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Constitutional Provisions: Official Language Related Part-17 of The Constitution Of India". Department of Official Language, Government of India. Retrieved 1 July 2015.
  2. 1 2 3 "Indiaspeak: English is our 2nd language - Times of India".
  3. ↑ "Census of India: Comparative speaker's strength of Scheduled Languages-1971, 1981, 1991 and 2001".
  4. 1 2 3 4 S, Rukmini. "Sanskrit and English: there’s no competition".
  5. ↑ "Census of India : India at a glance / Population".
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