Linguistic Diversity in India

• Language is more than a tool of communication. It is a repository of culture, knowledge and identity, carrying a society’s traditions, values and collective memory across generations.
• India is a polyglot country: Census 2011 grouped nearly 20,000 mother-tongue names into 121 languages of five families. Twenty-two of them are scheduled languages, spoken as mother tongue by 96.7% of Indians.
• Language shapes the map of States, education, administration and politics. It is both a cultural asset and a challenge for national integration, and it is the most visible strand of India’s racial, linguistic and ethnic diversity.

Language and Linguistic Diversity

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Why Language Matters

• Carrier of culture: each language encodes its own folklore, literature, worldview and indigenous knowledge (plants, soils, weather, medicine). When a language dies, much of this knowledge goes with it.
• Cognition and learning: the mother tongue is the first medium through which a child understands the world.
  • Children taught in a familiar language grasp concepts faster, achieve more and drop out less.
  • A strong first language also makes it easier to learn other languages.
• Identity and belonging: language marks social and regional identity and holds ethnic and regional groups together.
• Power: language can be an instrument of domination, through the hegemony of a dominant language, or of assertion, through cultural revival and identity movements.
• Economy: local languages matter for markets, services and cultural industries (publishing, film, media). Command of link languages widens job opportunities.
• Confidence: mastery of one’s own language builds self-confidence and pride in one’s heritage.
• Foundation of society: language is a system of symbols and meanings through which people express thought and emotion. A society without its own linguistic base risks losing its cultural distinctiveness and continuity, so preserving languages is part of nation-building.

How India’s Languages Evolved

• Indo-Aryan:
  • Vedic and Classical Sanskrit gave way to the spoken Prakrits (Pali, Ardhamagadhi, Shauraseni, Maharashtri);
  • these became the Apabhramsha forms;
  • from about 1000 CE the modern languages emerged: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Odia, Assamese, Punjabi and others.
• Dravidian: Tamil has the oldest literature, the Sangam poems of the early centuries CE. Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam developed their own literatures in the following millennium.
  • Dravidian speech is older in India than Aryan, and the family has no relatives outside the subcontinent.
  • Malayalam grew out of old Tamil from about the tenth century and was an independent language by the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, with heavy Sanskrit influence.
  • Kannada passed through three stages: Old (to the thirteenth century), Medieval (to the sixteenth) and Hosa Kannada today.
  • Telugu, the largest of the family, is called the “Italian of the East”, and its speakers reached Myanmar, Indo-China and South Africa. Tamil is also widely spoken in Sri Lanka.
• Sanskrit was the language of administration and of the cultural elite until about the ninth century. It is no longer a spoken language.
• Persian was the court language of the Sultanate and the Mughals. Contact between Persian and the speech of the Delhi region produced Hindustani, written as Urdu (Perso-Arabic script) and Hindi (Devanagari).
  • In the nineteenth century the two forms drew apart along script and religious lines, and Punjabi became linked with Gurmukhi and the Sikh community.
• English entered administration and higher education after 1835, when the colonial government chose English-medium education. It has stayed as a language of power and mobility.
  • It replaced Persian in courts, administration and higher learning.
  • Since Independence its hold as a medium of instruction has weakened: non-Hindi States moved schooling, universities and public service examinations towards regional languages, and regional newspapers and films have grown.
• Script reform, printing and nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries standardised the modern languages and made them symbols of regional identity.

Measuring India’s Languages

• George Abraham Grierson‘s Linguistic Survey of India (published 1903–1928) recorded 179 languages and 544 dialects. It remains the base of Indian language classification.
  • Of the 179, 116 were small tribal speeches of the northern and north-eastern fringes, used by under 1% of the people.
• India has been called a “veritable tower of Babel” and, by Akshay Ramanlal Desai, a “museum of tongues”.
• The census asks each person’s mother tongue: the language spoken to the person in childhood by the mother, or mainly at home.
  • The 1961 Census recorded 1,652 mother tongues.
    • It also listed 187 languages: 94 had fewer than 10,000 speakers, and 23 languages covered about 97% of the people, a commonly quoted figure not confirmed in the Census tables.
  • The 2011 Census received 19,569 raw returns. After linguistic scrutiny these were rationalised to 1,369 mother tongues, with another 1,474 names left unclassified.
  • Mother tongues with 10,000 or more speakers (270 of them) were grouped into 121 languages: 22 scheduled and 99 non-scheduled.
  • 14 languages have more than 1 crore speakers: the thirteen listed below and Bhili/Bhilodi.
• The People of India project of the Anthropological Survey of India counted 325 languages in 25 scripts among 4,635 communities.
• Languages in public use, on an older count: 87 in print media, 71 in radio broadcasting, 47 as a medium of instruction in schools and 15 in administration.
• The Bhasha Research and Publication Centre, Vadodara, counted about 1,100 languages in 1961 and about 780 in 2013, with some 220 lost, mostly those of nomadic groups.
• Limitations of census data:
  • Mother tongue understates multilingual competence. About 26% of Indians reported a second language and about 7% a third (Census 2011).
  • Grouping hides diversity. More than fifty mother tongues, from Bhojpuri to Marwari, are counted under Hindi.
  • Languages with fewer than 10,000 speakers are not listed by name, so the smallest and most endangered tongues disappear from the tables.
  • Migrants often stop using their mother tongue in daily life and adopt the dominant regional language.
• Patterns of multilingualism:
  • Counting first, second and third languages together, Hindi is known by well over half of Indians, and English by about a tenth (Census 2011).
  • Bilingualism is highest in cities, border districts and among minority-language speakers. These people must learn the State language to study and work.
  • Speakers of large languages in their home State (Hindi in the north, Tamil in Tamil Nadu) are the most often monolingual.
• India’s diversity is therefore best seen as functional multilingualism: people use different languages at home, in the market, at school and at work, not in fixed linguistic compartments.

Language Families

• The linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterji gave the families old Indian names that are still used: Nishada (Austric), Dravida, Kirata (Sino-Tibetan) and Arya (Indo-European).

• Indo-Aryan (the Arya family of older texts):
  • Fifteen of the 22 scheduled languages: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Urdu, Odia, Punjabi, Assamese, Maithili, Kashmiri, Nepali, Sindhi, Dogri, Konkani and Sanskrit.
  • It covers the northern plains, the west, the east and the centre, and also includes large tribal languages such as Bhili and Halabi.
  • Dardic branch: small mountain tongues of Kashmir and the Pakistan–Afghanistan frontier: Shina, Kohistani, Khowar (Chitrali) and Kafiri (Nuristani).
    • Kashmiri has a Dardic base but deep Sanskrit and Prakrit influence, so many scholars treat it as Indo-Aryan, and Dardic as a branch of Indo-Aryan.
    • Most of the others are fading, with very few speakers each.
  • Regional grouping of the rest:
    • Northern: Nepali, Central Pahari and Western Pahari.
    • North-western: Kachchhi and Sindhi.
    • Southern: Marathi and Konkani.
    • Eastern: Bihari, Odia, Bengali and Assamese.
    • East-central: Awadhi, Bagheli and Chhattisgarhi.
    • Central: Hindi, Punjabi and Rajasthani.
  • The core of Hindi is the Khari Boli region of Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, with dialects shading outward from it.
• Dravidian (the Dravida family), named by Robert Caldwell (1856):
  • Southern: Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Tulu, Kodava and Toda.
  • South-central: Telugu, Gondi, Kui and Kuvi.
  • Central: Kolami and Parji.
  • Northern: Kurukh, Malto and Brahui (in Balochistan).
  • Its pockets in central India suggest that Dravidian speech was once more widespread.
• Austro-Asiatic (the Austric or Nishada family):
  • Munda branch: Santali, Mundari, Ho, Kharia, Savara, Korku, Juang and Bhumij, in the Chotanagpur plateau, Odisha and the Satpura hills.
    • Kherwari is the largest group among about fourteen Munda tongues, with a rich oral stock of songs and stories in Santali, Mundari and Ho.
  • Mon-Khmer branch: Khasi, Pnar and War of Meghalaya, and Nicobarese.
    • Khasi was written in the Bengali–Assamese script until Welsh Methodist missionaries brought the Roman alphabet about a century ago.
  • Santali is the only scheduled language of this family. It has its own script, Ol Chiki.
• Tibeto-Burmese (the Sino-Tibetan or Kirata family): the most fragmented family, with 66 languages but only about 1% of speakers.
  • Himalayan: Bhoti (Ladakhi), Lahauli, Kinnauri, Lepcha, Sherpa and Limbu.
  • North-eastern: Bodo, Dimasa, Garo, Kokborok (Tripuri) and Rabha; the Naga languages; Mizo, Thado and Hmar of the Kuki-Chin group; Manipuri (Meitei); Adi, Nyishi, Apatani and Mishmi of Arunachal; Karbi.
  • Manipuri and Bodo are scheduled.
  • An older threefold division is still met with:
    • Tibeto-Himalayan: a Himalayan group (Chamba, Lahauli, Kanauri, Lepcha) and a Bhutia group (Tibetan, Balti, Ladakhi, Sherpa, Sikkim Bhutia);
    • North Assam or Arunachal: Aka, Dafla, Abor, Miri, Mishmi and Mishing;
    • Assam–Myanmar: Bodo, Naga, Kachin, Kuki-Chin and Burmese groups.
• Others: the Andamanese languages (Great Andamanese, Onge, Jarawa), a family of their own; Arabic (Semito-Hamitic); and English (Germanic), the mother tongue of about 2.6 lakh people but a second language for many millions.
  • European languages survive in small pockets: Portuguese in Goa and French in Puducherry. Neither is scheduled, and nor is English, though its inclusion has been demanded.

Major Languages and Their Shares

• Census 2011 (share of population):
  • Hindi 43.63%, Bengali 8.03%, Marathi 6.86%, Telugu 6.70%, Tamil 5.70%, Gujarati 4.58%, Urdu 4.19%, Kannada 3.61%, Odia 3.10%, Malayalam 2.88%, Punjabi 2.74%, Assamese 1.26% and Maithili 1.12%.
  • These thirteen languages each have more than 1% of the population; together they cover about 94%.
• Earlier counts for comparison:
  • Census 2001: Hindi 41.03%, Bengali 8.11%, Telugu 7.19%, Marathi 6.99%, Tamil 5.91%, Urdu 5.01%, Gujarati 4.48%, Kannada 3.69%, Malayalam and Odia 3.21% each, Punjabi 2.83%, Assamese 1.28% and Maithili 1.18%.
  • Census 1991: Hindi 33.73 crore, Bengali 6.96 crore and Telugu 6.60 crore.
• With its variants, Hindi ranks third among the world’s languages by speakers, after English and Mandarin.
• Hindi’s share has risen: from 36.99% (1971) to 41.03% (2001) and 43.63% (2011), with 52.8 crore speakers.
  • This reflects faster population growth in the Hindi belt and the census practice of grouping regional mother tongues under Hindi: Bhojpuri (5.1 crore), Rajasthani (2.6 crore), Chhattisgarhi, Magahi, Haryanvi and others.
  • Counted with Urdu, which shares its grammar but uses the Perso-Arabic script, the Hindi–Urdu (Hindustani) speech community is close to half of India.
  • Many more speak Hindi as a second or third language, which makes it the main link language of the north and of the cities.
• Changing ranks:
  • Marathi overtook Telugu for third place in 2011, and Gujarati overtook Urdu.
  • The southern languages’ shares fell: Malayalam from 4.00% (1971) to 2.88% (2011), and Telugu from 8.16% to 6.70%. This followed the south’s early fertility decline.
  • Urdu fell from 5.01% to 4.19% in a single decade (2001–2011).
• Largest non-scheduled languages: Bhili/Bhilodi (1.04 crore), Gondi (30 lakh), Kurukh (20 lakh), Khandeshi (19 lakh), Tulu (18 lakh), Khasi and Ho (14 lakh each), Garo, Mundari and Tripuri. Most are tribal languages.
  • The next fifteen (lakh speakers, 2011): Kui 9.4, Mizo 8.3, Halabi 7.7, Korku 7.3, Miri/Mishing 6.3, Karbi 5.3, Munda 5.1, Savara 4.1, Koya 4.1, Nyishi 4.1, Kharia 3.0, Ao 2.6, English 2.6, Adi 2.5 and Konyak 2.4.
  • Each groups several mother tongues: 18 under Bhili/Bhilodi, and 5 each under Gondi, Khandeshi and Khasi.
• English remains the language of higher education, the higher judiciary, business and much of administration. Indian writers in English have gained a wide international readership.
  • Despite Hindi’s reach, replacing English as a lingua franca has proved difficult in so multilingual a country.

Linguistic Regions

• The language map has a clear structure:
  • a Hindi heartland from Rajasthan and Haryana to Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh;
    • The label hides variety: the speech of Garhwal, Kumaon, Magadh, Rajasthan and Bastar is all counted as the Hindi area.
  • a ring of regional-language States around it, each named after or built on its language: Punjabi, Kashmiri, Gujarati, Marathi, Konkani, Odia, Bengali and Assamese;
  • the Dravidian south of Telugu, Kannada, Tamil and Malayalam;
  • the tribal-language islands of the central belt: Bhili, Gondi, Santali, Mundari, Ho, Kurukh;
  • the Tibeto-Burman mosaic of the Himalaya and the north-east.
• Twelve widely spoken languages give twelve linguistic regions: Kashmiri, Punjabi, Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Odia, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam. Tribal languages of the north-east, east and centre do not fit this pattern, since they are many and have no fixed territory.
• No State is monolingual:
  • Assam is 48% Assamese and 29% Bengali;
  • Karnataka is 67% Kannada, with 11% Urdu and large Telugu, Tamil and Marathi minorities;
  • Jharkhand is 62% Hindi, with Santali and Bengali near a tenth each and Urdu 6%.
• Bilingual border zones are common: Belagavi (Karnataka–Maharashtra), Kasaragod (Keralam–Karnataka), Hosur (Tamil Nadu–Karnataka), the Odisha–Andhra borderlands and the Bengal–Assam frontier.
  • A linguistic boundary is rarely a sharp line. It is a transitional zone across which one language gradually gives way to another, so State boundaries do not always match language boundaries.
  • The language of a neighbour often ranks second inside a State: Tamil in Keralam (Kerala), Telugu in Tamil Nadu, Urdu in Telangana.
  • On older estimates, Urdu is a second language for over 4.3 crore people across States and Hindi for about 3 crore outside the Hindi belt, while about a tenth of Telugu speakers live outside Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
• Linguistic diversity in the north-eastern States:
  • Non-scheduled languages are the majority in Nagaland (88%), Mizoram (88%), Meghalaya (85%) and Arunachal Pradesh (72%).
  • Arunachal Pradesh is among the most linguistically diverse areas of Asia, with dozens of small Tibeto-Burman languages.
  • Nagaland has more than a dozen Naga languages. Its people communicate through Nagamese, an Assamese-based creole, and English, which is the official language.
  • Meghalaya uses English as its official language, with Khasi and Garo as associate official languages. Mizoram uses Mizo and English.
  • Manipur’s valley speaks Manipuri (Meitei), while the hills speak Naga and Kuki-Chin languages.
  • In Arunachal, with no dominant tribal language, a local form of Hindi has spread as the common language between tribes, alongside English in schools.
  • Many north-eastern languages are written in the Roman script, introduced by missionaries in the nineteenth century, while Manipuri has revived its own Meitei Mayek script.
  • In the plains of Assam and Tripura, Assamese, Bengali, Bodo and Kokborok meet.
• Cities as language mixers:
  • Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Chennai host speakers of dozens of languages, drawn by migration.
  • Street-level link languages such as Bambaiya Hindi in Mumbai, and English in offices, let them work together.
  • Debates over signboards, jobs and school languages in these cities reflect the tension between the State language and a mixed population.
• Spatial principle: large languages occupy the open plains and deltas, while the hills, forests and frontiers hold many small languages. This mirrors the corridors and refuges of Indian history.

Language and the Indian State

Constitutional Provisions

• Official language of the Union (Part XVII):
  • Article 343: Hindi in the Devanagari script is the official language of the Union. English was to continue for fifteen years.
  • Article 344: an Official Language Commission and a Parliamentary Committee.
  • Article 351: a directive to promote the spread of Hindi as a medium of expression for India’s composite culture.
    • Critics warn that this, with the push for English, can marginalise speakers of other languages.
• The Official Languages Act, 1963 (amended 1967) allows English to continue alongside Hindi indefinitely. This followed Tamil Nadu’s anti-Hindi agitation of 1965.
  • Making Hindi the sole central language by 1965 met resistance, above all in the Dravidian south. Critics argued that its literary tradition was less developed than that of Bengali, Tamil, Telugu or Marathi, and that its Sanskritised vocabulary was hard to follow. Its use in public service examinations was seen as imposition.
• Languages of the States:
  • Article 345: a State may adopt one or more languages for official use.
  • Article 347: the President may recognise a language spoken by a substantial section of a State’s population.
• Courts: Article 348 keeps English in the Supreme Court and High Courts.
  • With the President’s consent, Hindi may be authorised in High Court proceedings. This is done in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar.
  • Since 2023 the Supreme Court has been publishing its judgments in translation in several Indian languages.
• Linguistic minorities:
  • Article 29: any section of citizens may conserve its distinct language, script or culture.
  • Article 30: minorities may establish and administer educational institutions of their choice.
  • Article 350: the right to submit grievances in any language used in the Union or a State.
  • Article 350A (added in 1956): States must provide primary education in the mother tongue for linguistic minority children.
  • Article 350B: a Special Officer for Linguistic Minorities, functioning as the Commissioner for Linguistic Minorities since 1957, investigates and reports to the President.
• The Eighth Schedule began with 14 languages in 1950. It grew to 22:
  • Sindhi (21st Amendment, 1967);
  • Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali (71st, 1992);
  • Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santali (92nd, 2003, in force 2004).
  • Oriya was renamed Odia in 2011.
  • Demands for inclusion are pending from many languages, including Bhojpuri, Rajasthani, Tulu, Bhoti, Khasi and Gondi. There are no fixed criteria for inclusion.
• Classical languages: the status recognises antiquity of 1,500–2,000 years, a body of ancient literature and knowledge texts. It now covers eleven languages:
  • Tamil (2004), Sanskrit (2005), Telugu and Kannada (2008), Malayalam (2013) and Odia (2014);
  • Marathi, Pali, Prakrit, Assamese and Bengali (October 2024).
• Institutions for languages:
  • the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysuru (1969), for research, teacher training and endangered languages;
  • the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology (1961), which builds technical vocabularies in Hindi and other languages;
  • the Sahitya Akademi (1954), which honours literature in 24 languages: the 22 scheduled languages plus English and Rajasthani;
  • State language academies and official-language departments.

Linguistic Reorganisation of States

• At Independence, provinces and princely States had been formed by conquest and administrative convenience, not language. After the integration of the princely States, demand grew for language-based provinces, which the Congress had backed since the 1920s.
• Sequence:
  • Dhar Commission (1948): preferred administrative convenience to language.
  • JVP Committee (1949) of Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and Pattabhi Sitaramayya: also cautioned against linguistic States.
  • Potti Sriramulu‘s fast for a Telugu State ended in his death in December 1952. Riots followed, and Andhra State was formed on 1 October 1953.
  • The States Reorganisation Commission (Fazl Ali, K. M. Panikkar and H. N. Kunzru), appointed in 1953, reported in 1955. It accepted language as an important basis, but not the only one, and rejected “one language, one State” as a rigid rule.
  • The States Reorganisation Act, 1956 created 14 States and 6 Union Territories from 1 November 1956.
• Later changes:
  • Bombay was divided into Maharashtra and Gujarat (1960).
  • Nagaland became a State (1963).
  • Punjab was reorganised into Punjab and Haryana, with hill areas going to Himachal Pradesh (1966).
  • Meghalaya, Manipur and Tripura became States (1972).
  • Goa gained statehood (1987), and Konkani was later scheduled.
• Later States were formed more on tribal identity, regional backwardness and administrative grounds than on language: Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand (2000), and Telangana (2014), which shares Telugu with Andhra Pradesh.
• Evaluation:
  • It accommodated identity within a federal Union and weakened secessionist pressure.
  • It made administration and schooling in regional languages possible.
  • It also sharpened regionalism, left border disputes (Belagavi), turned some speakers into new minorities inside States, and encouraged “sons-of-the-soil” politics.
• Linguistic regionalism, in sum, strengthened regional consciousness without breaking national integration, because the Union accepted plural languages instead of imposing one.

Language Conflicts

• Goa: Konkani and Marathi speakers disagreed over merger with Maharashtra. The 1967 opinion poll kept Goa separate, and Konkani later became its official language.
• Belagavi (Belgaum): claimed by Maharashtra for its Marathi-speaking majority but held by Karnataka. It remains the longest-running linguistic border dispute.
• Assam: the Assam Official Language Act, 1960 made Assamese the State language. It provoked a movement in the Bengali-speaking Barak valley, culminating in the police firing at Silchar in 1961; Bengali was then allowed in the valley.
• Urdu in the Hindi belt: Urdu speakers sought recognition, and Urdu became a second official language in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in the 1980s.
• Tamil Nadu: the anti-Hindi agitations of 1937–40 and 1965 shaped national language policy and the continuation of English.
• Demands for the Eighth Schedule and for language-based autonomy continue, from Bhojpuri and Rajasthani to Tulu and Bhoti.
• Such conflicts are strongest in border zones and multi-ethnic regions, where one group’s language becomes another’s barrier.

Linguistic Minorities

• Neither the Constitution nor any law defines a linguistic minority. The courts have filled the gap:
  • DAV College v. State of Punjab (1971): a linguistic minority must have a separate spoken language. It need not have a separate script.
  • T. M. A. Pai Foundation v. State of Karnataka (2002): minority status, linguistic or religious, is judged State by State, against the State’s population.
  • In a challenge to a State law, status is judged against that State’s population, not the whole country’s.
  • The Calcutta High Court (1994) held that Anglo-Indians whose language is English remain a linguistic minority in West Bengal, even though English is an official language.
• States notify their own linguistic minorities. Karnataka, for example, lists Urdu, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi, Tulu, Lambani, Hindi, Konkani and Gujarati.
• The National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities identifies a linguistic minority by numerical inferiority, non-dominance within the State and a distinct linguistic identity.
  • It holds that keeping only to a minority language can bring socio-economic backwardness, which learning the majority language can ease.
  • Critics reply that this favours assimilation over preservation, builds no institutional support for minority languages and does not ensure equal opportunity.
• A 2006 workshop on linguistic minorities asked that the term be clearly defined, and that the definition frame affirmative action based on socio-economic backwardness.
• P. Avinash Reddy argues that despite constitutional protection, institutional threats and neglect persist, so affirmative action is vital.
• Tribal languages are the most vulnerable:
  • Most tribal children are taught in a majority language from the start. This leads to high dropout rates, poor learning and loss of the home language.
  • The High-Level Committee on tribal communities chaired by Virginius Xaxa (2014) found low literacy among Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups. It traced this to poor schools, untrained teachers, no instruction in tribal languages and irrelevant curricula.
  • The Draft National Policy on Tribal Groups warns that changing education can endanger tribal languages, and stresses mother-tongue teaching at the primary level.
  • Very few schemes bring tribal languages into schools. Recommendations that stop short of minority-language instruction amount to forced assimilation.
  • Reservation in higher education helps little if earlier schooling in an unfamiliar language has already pushed students out.
• Way forward:
  • mother-tongue-based multilingual education in the early years;
  • teaching materials in tribal languages;
  • teachers drawn from the community;
  • the regional language and English taught as second and third languages.

The Three-Language Formula and NEP 2020

• The formula was devised at the Chief Ministers’ conference of 1961, refined by the Kothari Commission (1964–66), and adopted in the National Policy on Education, 1968, under the Indira Gandhi government:
  • Hindi-speaking States: Hindi, English and a modern Indian language, preferably a southern one;
  • non-Hindi States: the regional language, Hindi and English.
• Aims: national integration, mobility between States, and equal treatment of Hindi and non-Hindi regions.
• Implementation was uneven, since education is largely a State concern:
  • many Hindi States taught Sanskrit as the third language instead of a southern language;
  • Tamil Nadu has followed a two-language policy (Tamil and English) since 1968;
  • the National Policy on Education, 1986 kept the formula and restated the promotion of Hindi.
• National Education Policy (NEP) 2020:
  • The medium of instruction should be the home language, mother tongue or regional language until at least Class 5, preferably until Class 8 and beyond.
  • The formula continues with more flexibility. The three languages are chosen by States, regions and students, provided that at least two are native to India, and no language is imposed on any State.
• Views on mother-tongue teaching:
  • Sridhar Rajagopalan (Educational Initiatives): children learn best in the language around them during the primary years; English should be learned but not be the early medium. Sanskrit is also gaining academic recognition, including in European universities.
  • V. K. Tewari (IIT Kharagpur): primary schooling in regional languages, with Sanskrit in the formula, can greatly help rural areas.
  • Sanjay Padode (IFIM Business School): early schooling in the mother tongue speeds the grasp of basics and cuts the cognitive load of an unfamiliar language.
  • Aekta Nandwana Chanda (ChildFund India): materials exist in only a few standard languages, so content in diverse and tribal languages needs investment.
• Continuing debate:
  • Tamil Nadu has kept its two-language policy and opposed the formula. It credits more than five decades of this model with significant social and economic progress.
  • In 2025 Maharashtra issued orders making Hindi the default third language in Classes 1–5, then withdrew them in June after protests and set up a review committee.
  • The debate sets national integration against regional autonomy and identity.

Language in Courts and Administration

• Arguments for regional languages in courts and offices:
  • most litigants and citizens do not understand English;
  • justice and services should be delivered in a language people follow;
  • colonial courts too recorded evidence in vernacular languages.
• Arguments for caution:
  • legal education and the body of case law are largely in English;
  • standard legal terminology in many Indian languages is still developing;
  • lawyers practise across India under the Advocates Act, 1961, and a change of language can limit that mobility.
• Haryana’s move to use Hindi in its subordinate courts, and Punjab and Haryana High Court judgments supplied in Hindi, show the trend towards language access.
  • The decision covered courts and tribunals below the Punjab and Haryana High Court. Critics called it discriminatory and contrary to Article 19(1)(g), citing Section 30 of the Advocates Act.
  • In June 2020 a Supreme Court bench of Chief Justice S. A. Bobde and Justices A. S. Bopanna and Hrishikesh Roy refused to intervene. It noted that about 80% of litigants do not understand English, and saw nothing inherently wrong with Hindi in subordinate courts. An earlier plea had been withdrawn as premature.
  • In May 2018 the High Court gave a litigant a copy of a judgment in Hindi.
• The debate sets accessibility against uniformity, professional mobility against linguistic identity, and efficiency against inclusion.
• A balance lies in bilingual systems: English for the higher courts and uniform precedent, regional languages for evidence, orders and public access, backed by translation tools.

Linguistic Diversity: Asset and Challenge

Impact on the Development of Regions

• Communication barriers:
  • With no single common language, people from different regions often cannot talk directly, which weakens inter-State mobility and national cohesion.
  • English and Hindi act as bridges, but neither reaches everyone.
• Education and human capital:
  • Where the medium of instruction is English or a dominant language that children do not speak at home, learning suffers and dropouts rise. Tribal and border regions are hit hardest.
  • At the same time, the English divide limits access to higher education and well-paid jobs for those schooled only in regional languages.
• Economy and labour markets:
  • Firms prefer English-speaking employees for services and IT.
  • Employers in some States favour local-language speakers, which can deter migrants.
  • Language-based job reservation demands (for example in Karnataka and Maharashtra) affect the free movement of labour.
• Politics: language can be mobilised for electoral gain and regional assertion, and can produce inter-State friction over borders, rivers and migrants.
  • Politicians who struggle to reach a linguistically diverse electorate may fall back on divisive appeals to particular communities.
• Migration: language shapes migration streams. Hindi-speaking workers move mainly within the Hindi belt and to western cities, while migrants to Keralam, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka must work across a language barrier, which affects their wages, their children’s schooling and their access to services.
• Inequality: people who speak neither Hindi nor English, or only a minor language, can be marginalised in courts, offices and markets.
• Governance: translating laws, forms and services into many languages is costly and slow, and gaps in translation delay schemes.
• Opportunities:
  • a huge cultural economy of film, publishing, music and media in many languages;
  • localised digital markets as internet use spreads in Indian languages;
  • soft power, and a population used to switching between languages.
• Regional outcomes vary: the southern and western States combined strong regional-language administration with English education and developed quickly. Tribal and hill areas with many small languages and weak schooling lag behind.

Vanishing Plurality: Endangered Languages

• India’s small languages are declining:
  • UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger lists about 197 Indian languages as endangered, more than any other country;
  • One widely quoted estimate puts nearly 400 languages at risk of dying out within 50 years.
  • Bo, one of the Great Andamanese languages, died with its last speaker, Boa Sr, in 2010.
• Causes:
  • schooling in dominant languages;
  • migration to cities;
  • media and markets using a few big languages;
  • inter-group marriage;
  • a status gap that makes parents prefer Hindi, English or the regional language for their children.
• Census rationalisation under-records small languages, so their decline is often invisible in official data.
• Responses:
  • The Scheme for Protection and Preservation of Endangered Languages (SPPEL, 2013) of the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysuru documents languages with fewer than 10,000 speakers. 117 were chosen in its first phase.
  • The UGC supports centres for endangered languages in universities.
  • Several States now produce primers in tribal languages for early grades. Odisha’s multilingual education programme is one example.
  • Scripts such as Ol Chiki (Santali) and Warang Citi (Ho) support literacy and identity.

Measures for Managing Diversity

• Link languages: support Hindi and English as bridges without imposing either.
• Mother-tongue education: teach in the mother tongue in the early years, then add the regional language and English.
• Technology: machine translation and Indian-language interfaces (for example the Bhashini platform) can make services available in many languages.
• Skill programmes in English and regional languages to widen access to jobs.
• Multilingual administration and courts, including the translation of laws and judgments.
• Documentation and revival of endangered languages, with community participation.
• Managed in this way, linguistic diversity becomes a resource for development and integration rather than a source of division.