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Karmayogi

Languages

The government of India recognizes 112 mother tongues that have 10,000 more speakers. India has a total of 1652 different languages and dialects, and most people understand no more than five! This was bound to hapen in a country where different races and stocks poured in for over five thousand years? They all came, mixed and stayed, making the land one big heterogenous existence.

The Prinicpal languages of the World, 2004 World Almanac
Source: Ethnologue Volume I, SIL International, USA and Prof. Sidney Culbert, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
(All figures are 2000 estimates, in millions)

Language	Native speakers	Total speakers
Mandarin Hindi English Spanish Arabic Bengali Portuguese Russian Japanese German Korean French Chinese, Wu Malay-Indo Chinese, Yue Telugu Marathi Vietnamese Tamil	874 366 341 322 211 207 176 167 125 100 78 77 77 75 71 69 68 68 66	1,075 496 514 425 256 215 194 275 126 128 78 129 77 176 71 69 68 68 66

Official Languages of India

Hindi and English are the co-official national languages of India. In addition, the Indian constitution recognizes 18 state languages, which are used in schools and in official transactions. These are Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada (Kanarese), Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Meithei (Manipuri), Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Telugu, Tamil, and Urdu. The regional languages have been recognized as the official language of the States. In many cases, the state boundaries are drawn between linguistic lines.

Fast Facts:
- Hindi is the second most widely spoken language in the world.

- India has the most (1652) languages and dialects compared to any other country in the world.

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