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 Article 346 of the Indian Constitution recognizes Hindi in Devanagari script as the official language of India. The Constitution also allows the English language to be associate official language. In 1967, there were 15 national languages in India spoken in over 1600 dialects. They were the Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Later, Sindhi, Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali were also included in the list thereby increasing the number of official regional languages of India to 18.
The Constitution of India recognizes 22 languages, spoken in different parts the country, namely Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Meitei, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. By a formal Declaration of the Indian government, Tamil and Sanskrit are the recognized as Classical Languages of India.
There are several hundred mother tongues in India. It is estimated that 850 languages are in daily use. Other languages spoken in India include Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, Armenian, Burushaski, Western Farsi, German Deng, Lisu, Northern Pashto, Portuguese, Russian, Thami, Chitwania Tharu, Kathoriya Tharu, Uyghur, Walungge, Arabic and Chinese.
The languages of India primarily belong to two major linguistic families, namely, Indo-European and Dravidian. Indo-Aryan, a branch of Indo-European, is spoken by about 70% of the Indian population. It also includes minority languages such as Persian, Portuguese or French and English as lingua franca. Dravidian, the second largest in terms of speakers, is spoken by about 22%. Other languages spoken in India come mainly from the Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman linguistic families, as well as a few language isolates such as Nihali language.
3 millennia of language contact in India have led to significant mutual influence among the 4 language families in India and South Asia. The 2 contact languages, Persian and English have played an important role in the history of India.
Indian languages have equivalent distinct alphabets. The two major families are those of the Dravidian languages largely confined to the south and the Indo-Aryan languages prominent in the north. Urdu and sometimes Kashmiri, Sindhi and Punjabi are written in modified versions of the Arabic script. The alphabets of all other Indian languages are native to India. Most scholars consider these Indic scripts a distant offshoot of the Aramaic alphabet, although the opinion of the scholars may differ.
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