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:
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