Introduction

India is a multilingual country, whose multilingualism has been to a great extent institutionalised. In India, we find languages from four different language families. In much of Northern India, languages from the eastern branch of the Indo-European family of languages – the Indo-Iranian subfamily – are spoken. This subfamily includes two of the most widely spoken languages in the world (after Mandarin and English) – Hindi and Bengali (which is also spoken in Bangladesh), as well as Marathi, Punjabi and many others. The second language family consists of the Dravidian languages, which are spoken in South India. The major Dravidian languages are Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu (which in terms of the number of speakers comes close to Bengali). The other two language families found in India consist basically of tribal languages, each of which is spoken by a far smaller population. Here, we may enumerate the Munda languages of the Austro-Asiatic group of languages, spoken in Central and Eastern India, and the Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in the north and east (Shapiro & Schiffman, 1983). As for raw numbers, according to the 2001 Census, there were over 420 million speakers of Hindi (but see below), 83 million Bengali speakers and over 74 million Telugu speakers. This may be compared to about a quarter of a million Indians who claim English to be their first language.

Of the multitude of languages, and dialects of these languages, 22 have been selected over the years since independence in 1947 as the official languages of India, for the most part because of regional affiliation. The status of languages in the independent Indian Union is set out in Part XVII (articles 343–351) of the 1951 Constitution.