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Although the Indian constitution recognizes eighteen languages as the official languages of the country, Hindi and English are the most commonly spoken languages. Some of the officially recognized languages are very state-specific spoken by the people of that particular state only. For instance, the local people of Maharashtra speak Marathi. By using the term ‘officially recognized’, one means that these languages may be used for appearing in government examinations. In reality, only Hindi and English are nationally used languages.
English has gained tremendous importance in the Indian education system and economy. Most of the schools, especially in the cities and towns, have English as the first language and all communication, written and spoken, takes place in English. A person coming to Mumbai city for a job, will be unable to get one if he does not know the English and Hindi languages.
Indians speak fluent and correct English. However, their English accent is completely different from the British and American English. Indians migrating abroad have to necessarily change their accent in order to be understood by foreigners.
English has become a truly universal language. It has even adopted certain Hindi words such as ‘sari’ (a traditional Indian dress for women) or ‘curry’ (an Indian dish made of pulses).
Even though there are only eighteen languages recognized by the Indian constitution, there are many more languages and in addition, each language has a number of dialects (also known as mother tongue). There are more than two hundred mother tongues recorded by the Indian census.
Hindi has at least 13 dialects, some of them completely different from each other. Hindi spoken in Rajasthan is different from Hindi spoken in Bihar or Hindi of Himachal Pradesh. The Hindi language officially recognized uses the Devanagiri script.
India is made up of twenty-six states. Some states are created based on their main language. For instance, the state of Tamil Nadu is made up of Tamil speakers, Maharashtra of Marathi speakers, West Bengal of Bengali speakers. These languages are not spoken widely out of their respective states. However, languages such as Urdu (spoken by Muslims) or Sindhi (spoken by Sindhis) are spoken in all parts of the country where there are Muslims or Sindhis respectively.
Eighteen languages recognized by the constitution of India are:
1. Assamese.
2. Bengali.
3. Gujarati.
4. Hindi.
5. Kannada.
6. Kashmiri.
7. Konkani.
8. Malayalam.
9. Manipuri.
10. Marathi.
11. Nepali.
12. Oriya.
13. Punjabi.
14. Sanskrit.
15. Sindhi.
16. Tamil.
17. Telugu.
18. Urdu.
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