The Language Situation and the Language Policy in India

The Language Situation and the Language Policy in India 

There is a general misunderstanding that India has more than 18 official languages such as Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. They are, however, merely languages designated by the Constitution of India as languages to be promoted officially.

According to the Constitution, the official languages of the Union are Hindi and English. On the other hand, most of the 18 languages mentioned above are adopted as an official language of their original regions. They are regional languages except Sanskrit (a India’s classical language), Sindhi (its original place is not in India but in Pakistan), and Urdu (the Pan-Islamic common language in the subcontinent). Hindi in the Devanagari script is the official language of India. However, English continues to be the official working language. For not a few educated Indians, English is virtually their first language. For a great number of educated multi-lingual Indians, it is the second one.

The Constitution also identifies 18 regional languages mentioned above as “languages of India”. According to a recent survey, there are around 325 languages spoken in India. With around 325 languages and more than 700 dialects, the only language that educated Indians from different regions have in common is not Hindi  

but English, a language from outside by the British during their two-hundred-year occupation.

States of India are called “linguistic states” because the country has been distributed in 29 states, 6 Union Territories and a National Capital Territory, Delhi, on the basis of the languages mostly used in the region. The country has a wide variety of local languages and, in many cases, the State boundaries have been drawn on linguistic lines. Therefore, the state language of a state, to the majority of the

residents, is their mother tongue as well as the most representative local language of the region. Some Indian languages have evolved from the Indo-European group of languages. This set is known as the Indic group or the Indo-Aryan one. Another set  of languages is the Dravidian group and is native to South India, though a distinct influence of Sanskrit and Hindi is evident in these languages. Most of the Indian languages have their own script and rich literature.

Interestingly, many non-Hindi speakers complain that the government is forcing Hindi on them while many Hindi speakers say that the government is promoting English, neglecting Hindi and the other indigenous Indian languages. To the present author’s eyes, however, both claims seem to be true. But it seems that English is gaining more popularity, at least, among the urban educated Indians.