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Languages of India
India, as rich as it is in its culture and diversity also boasts of as many as 15 major languages and spoken in over 1600 dialects. In several cases many states boundaries are drawn on linguistic lines. The National language Hindi in the Devanagiri Script is spoken by about 45% of the population mainly in the area known as the Hindi Belt .Hindi is also the official language of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh., Haryana and Himachal Pradesh.
Assamese
The language of Assam,spoken by almost 60 percent of the State's population. The origin of the language dates back to the 13th century.
Bengali
One of the foremost Indo-Aryan languages, the official language of West Bengal . It developed as a verbal communication in the 13th century and is spoken now by about 200 million people in West Bengal and in Bangladesh.
Gujarati
The official language of Gujarat and is spoken by 70 % of the State's population.
Kannada
The state language of Karnataka and is spoken by 65 % of the state's population. It belongs to the Dravidian family and dates back to the 9th century as an independent language.
Kashmiri
A language of the Indo-Aryan group and is often wrongly taken as the state language of Jammu and Kashmir. Urdu is the state language of Jammu and Kashmir.55% of the state population are believed to speak in Kashmiri.
Konkani
The official language of Goa, predominantly based on classical Sanskrit and belongs to the southwestern section of Indo-Aryans. It is also spoken by Konkanis in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala.
Malayalam
The official language of Kerala. Malayalam developed as an independent language in the 10th century AD. A part and the youngest of all the developed languages in the Dravidian family .
Marathi
It is the official language of Maharashtra, The Indic language which dates back to the 13th century.
Oriya
A branch of the Indo-Aryan family . The official language of Orissa.
Punjabi
Belongs to the Indo-Aryan family and is the official language of the State of Punjab. Punjabi, although very ancient, became literary around the 15th Century. From the 19th Century, Punjabi showed dynamic development in all branches of literature. It is written in Gurmukhi script, created by the Sikh Guru, Angad.
Sindhi
It belongs to the Indo-Aryan family and preserved some of the ancient characteristics of the Indo-Aryan script.
Tamil
Oldest of the Dravidian languages and it is the State language of Tamil Nadu. Tamil literature goes back to Centuries before the Christian era. It's spoken by more than 73 million people. It signifys certain new literary types that are not in Sanskrit or other Aryan languages.
Telugu
A Dravidian language spoken by the people of Andhra Pradesh . Numerically the biggest linguistic unit in India . Telugu is found to be traced back to the 7th Century AD.
Urdu
The State language of Jammu and Kashmir and is spoken by more than 28 million people In India. Urdu and Hindi have advanced from the same source - Khariboli. Urdu is written in the Persio-Arabic script and contains many words from the Persian language.