India has 22 officially recognised languages as laid down by the constitution. Of these, Hindi is the official language of the federal government in Delhi and the language spoken by the largest percentage of the people. The other 21 languages are Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. English is an associate official language. Most of the languages spoken in the north and centre are of Aryan origin, the ones prevalent in the south are Dravidian, and Sini-Mongoloid languages dominate in the east of India. Tamil is one of the major Dravidian languages, and the oldest, with a long literary tradition dating back to 500 bc when the first Tamil literature, Sangam, was created.
Besides the official languages, there are also hundreds of minor languages and dialects spoken in the country, which come from either the Austro-Asiatic or the Tibeto-Burman linguistic families. Then there are the Andamanese languages, spoken on the Andaman Islands, which are not linked to any of the other families. Dialects are referred to as mother tongues and may be spoken by millions even though they are not recognised by the government.
After independence in 1947, India was divided into different states with the boundaries created on linguistic and religious lines. Each state has its own principal language, or in some cases, two or even three, that are used by its people. A good example of this is the north-eastern state of Sikkim which lists Lepcha, Bhutia and Nepali as its main languages. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a union territory in the Bay of Bengal, has as many as six principal languages—Hindi, Nicobarese, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu. In the case of Sikkim, while Lepcha and Bhutia are listed as principal languages, they are not recognised by the government. Neither is Nicobarese, spoken in Andaman and Nicobar.
Dravidian Languages
The Dravidian languages are believed to have derived from an ancient language spoken in India before the advent of the Aryans in 1500 bc. There are four major Dravidian languages: Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu, each of which has millions of speakers spread across southern India. In the Dravidian languages, verbs have a negative and an affirmative voice. The languages also make extensive use of suffixes with nouns and verbs. They have their own script, which is related to the Devanagri script used for Hindi. A prominent feature of the Dravidian languages is the way the sounds are created at the front of the mouth.
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