Though the Constitution of India has recognized 18 major languages (including three languages recognized in August, 1992) but as many as 1, 652 languages and dialects are spoken in our country. Broadly, these languages belong to three families of languages : Indo –Aryan, Dravidiyans and European. The Indo-Aryan languages include Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Oriya, Punjab, Bihari, Rajasthani, Assamese, Sanskrit, Sindhi, and Kashmiri languages covering about three fourths of India’s population. The Dravidian languages included Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada. The European languages include English, Portuguese and French. The last two languages are mostly spoken by the people of Goa and Pondichery. Hindi is the official language of India and English is an associate language. According to the 1991 figures, Hindi is spoken by the highest number of people (247.85 million) followed by Telugu (72.08 million), Bengali (71.78 million), Marathi (67.26 million), Tamil (60.60 million), Urdu (46.11 million), Gujarathi (41.37 million), Malayalam (35.32 million) and Punjabi (22.41 million). The rest of the languages languages are spoken by one million to twenty million each. Some states were even created after Independence on the language basis, for example Punjab was divided in Punjab and Haryana, and Maharashtra was divided in Maharashtra and Gujarat. Some states like Mizoram and Nagaland were created on a cultural basis.
