Language Families
The languages of India belong to several 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, or 69% of the population), but also including minority languages such as Persian, Portuguese or French, and English as a lingua franca. Kashmiri and other Dardic languages, which form part of the Indo-Iranian, and arguably Indo-Aryan family, have some 4.6 million speakers in India.
The second largest language family is the Dravidian family, accounting for some 200 million speakers, or 26%. Families with smaller numbers of speakers are Austro-Asiatic and numerous small Tibeto-Burman languages, with some 10 and 6 million speakers, respectively, together 5% of the population.
The Ongan languages of the southern Andaman Islands form a fifth family; the Great Andamanese languages are extinct apart from one highly endangered language with a dwindling number of speakers. There is also a known language isolate, the Nihali language. The Shompen language or languages is/are poorly attested and unclassified. Sentinelese is entirely unknown.
Most languages in the Indian republic are written in Brahmi-derived scripts, such as Devanagari, Kannada, Eastern Nagari - Assamese/Bengali, Telugu, Oriya, Tamil, etc., though Urdu is written in an Arabic script, and a few minor languages such as Santali use independent scripts.
Read more about this topic: Languages Of India
Famous quotes containing the words language and/or families:
“The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We now recognize that abuse and neglect may be as frequent in nuclear families as love, protection, and commitment are in nonnuclear families.”
—David Elkind (20th century)