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The languages of India primarily belong to two major linguistic families, Indo-European (whose branch Indo-Aryan is spoken by about 70% of the population) and Dravidian (spoken by about 22%). more...

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Other languages spoken in India come mainly from the Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman linguistic families, as well as a few language isolates.

Individual mother tongues in India number several hundred (SIL Ethnologue lists 415). According to Census of India of 2001, 29 languages are spoken by more than a million native speakers, 122 by more than 10,000. Three millennia of language contact has led to significant mutual influence among the four language families in India and South Asia. Two contact languages have played an important role in the history of India: Persian and English.

Sanskrit and Tamil are the classical languages of India according to the Government.

History

The northern Indian languages from the Indo-European family evolved from Old Indo-Aryan such as Sanskrit, by way of the Middle Indo-Aryan Prakrit languages and Apabhramsha of the Middle Ages. There is no consensus for a specific time where the modern north Indian languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Bengali and Oriya emerged, but CE 1000 is commonly accepted. Each language had different influences, with Hindi/Urdu and closely related languages being strongly influenced by Persian and Arabic. The South Indian (Dravidian) languages had a history independent of Sanskrit. However in later stages all the Dravidian languages had been heavily influenced by Sanskrit. The major Dravidian languages are Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.

Language families

The languages of India may be grouped by major language families. The largest of these in terms of speakers is the Indo-European family, predominantly represented in its Indo-Aryan branch (accounting for some 700 million speakers), but also including minority languages such as Persian, Portuguese or French, and English as lingua franca. The second largest is the Dravidian family, accounting for some 200 million speakers. Minor linguistic families include the Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman families (with some 10 and 6 million speakers, respectively). There is also a language isolate, the Nihali language.

Classical languages of India

Two classical languages, Sanskrit and Tamil, originated in India. By a formal Declaration of the Indian government, Sanskrit and Tamil are the recognized as Classical Languages of India. In the mid-19th century, Indologists referred to Paninian Sanskrit as \"classical Sanskrit,\" distinguishing it from the older Vedic language. Robert Caldwell, the first linguist to systematically study the Dravidian languages as a family, used the term \"classical\" to distinguish the literary forms of Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada and Tulu from the diglossic colloquial forms. In the second half of the 20th century, academics began to suggest that the Old Tamil poems of the Sangam anthologies were also \"classical\" in the sense that they shared many features with literatures commonly accepted as classical. This point, first made by Kamil Zvelebil in the 1970s, has since been supported by a number of other scholars, and the terminology \"classical Tamil\" is commonly used in historical literature to refer to texts from that period. Martha Ann Selby argues that if classicality is defined with reference to age and the value a literature has within the tradition it represents, the Tamil poetry of the Sangam anthologies and the Maharashtri poems of the Sattisai are \"classical\", in addition to Sanskrit literature.

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