If you are wondering how many languages are spoken in India, the official answer is 121. That is the number of languages with at least 10,000 speakers recorded in the 2011 Census of India. Of those, 22 are “scheduled” languages named in the Constitution, and they cover almost 97 percent of the population.
Yet you will also see 22, 270, 780 and even 19,500 quoted with total confidence. Oddly enough, none of those numbers is wrong. Each one counts something different, and once you know what, India’s language map becomes far easier to read. Explore our translation services for details.
Key Takeaways
- The 2011 Census grouped India’s speech varieties into 121 languages: 22 scheduled and 99 non-scheduled.
- People wrote down 19,569 different mother tongue names on census forms, which linguists sorted into 1,369 recognized mother tongues.
- Hindi and English are the official languages of the Union government, but India has no national language.
- Hindi is the largest language by far, reported as a mother tongue by about 43.6 percent of the population in 2011.
- Independent surveys that count small communities put the total much higher, at several hundred languages.
So, How Many Languages Are Spoken in India?
It depends on who is counting and what they count. India’s census does not ask “which language do you speak?” and then tick a box. It asks each person to name their mother tongue in their own words, and then experts tidy up the answers.
That process produces a ladder of numbers. Here is each rung, from the raw answers to the short constitutional list.
| Number | What it counts | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 19,569 | Raw mother tongue names returned on census forms, before any sorting or checking | Census of India 2011 |
| 1,369 | “Rationalized” mother tongues left after linguistic scrutiny of those raw answers | Census of India 2011 |
| 270 | Identifiable mother tongues with 10,000 or more speakers each | Census of India 2011 |
| 121 | Languages, once related mother tongues are grouped together | Census of India 2011 |
| 22 | Scheduled languages listed in the Eighth Schedule | Constitution of India |
| 2 | Official languages of the Union government: Hindi and English | Constitution of India, Article 343, and the Official Languages Act |
Why 19,569 is not really a language count
Headlines in 2018 announced that India has “more than 19,500 languages.” What the census actually reported, as The Tribune’s summary of the census language data shows, was 19,569 raw returns: every distinct name people gave for their mother tongue. One language can easily show up under several different names.
After scrutiny, those answers shrank to 1,369 recognized mother tongues, plus 1,474 names that were left unclassified. So 19,569 is best read as a measure of how people describe their own speech, not as a tally of languages. Explore our language dialects and accurate translation for details.
How 270 mother tongues become 121 languages
The census then keeps only mother tongues with at least 10,000 speakers, which leaves 270. Related ones are then grouped under a parent language to give the final figure of 121.
The 10,000 speaker cutoff matters. Speech communities smaller than that do not appear as separate languages on the list, which is one reason independent researchers arrive at much bigger totals.
What Are the 22 Scheduled Languages of India?
The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution is simply a list of languages with official recognition in India. It began with 14 names in 1950. Sindhi joined in 1967, Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali in 1992, and Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santali in 2003.
In alphabetical order, the 22 are: Explore our multilingual business communication for details.
- Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi
- Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri
- Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santali
- Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu
Together these languages were the mother tongues of 96.71 percent of India’s population in 2011. The other 99 languages on the census list share the remaining 3.29 percent.
Notice what is missing: English. It is an official language of the Union, yet it is not a scheduled language. Being on the schedule is about recognition and development, not about which language runs the government.
Is Hindi the National Language of India?
No. This is one of the most common myths about the country. India has no national language, and the Constitution never uses that label for any language.
What the Constitution does say, in Article 343, is that the official language of the Union is Hindi in the Devanagari script. English was meant to continue for 15 years as a transition. The Official Languages Act of 1963 then allowed English to stay in use alongside Hindi with no end date, and that is still the arrangement today. Explore our accurate translation for official documents for details.
The point was underlined in 2010, when the Gujarat High Court observed that there is nothing on record declaring Hindi the national language. In practice:
- Union government: works in Hindi and English.
- States: choose their own official languages, so Tamil Nadu works in Tamil, West Bengal in Bengali, Maharashtra in Marathi, and so on.
- Higher courts: proceedings in the Supreme Court are in English.
Which Languages Have the Most Speakers in India?
The 2011 Census counted about 1.21 billion people. The table below shows the twelve largest languages by mother tongue speakers, rounded to the nearest hundred thousand. For the full ranking, see this list of Indian languages by number of native speakers, which reproduces the census tables.
| Rank | Language | Mother tongue speakers (2011) | Share of population |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hindi | 528.3 million | 43.63% |
| 2 | Bengali | 97.2 million | 8.03% |
| 3 | Marathi | 83.0 million | 6.86% |
| 4 | Telugu | 81.1 million | 6.70% |
| 5 | Tamil | 69.0 million | 5.70% |
| 6 | Gujarati | 55.5 million | 4.58% |
| 7 | Urdu | 50.8 million | 4.19% |
| 8 | Kannada | 43.7 million | 3.61% |
| 9 | Odia | 37.5 million | 3.10% |
| 10 | Malayalam | 34.8 million | 2.88% |
| 11 | Punjabi | 33.1 million | 2.74% |
| 12 | Assamese | 15.3 million | 1.26% |
A note on the Hindi figure
The Hindi total is a grouped number. The census places dozens of mother tongues under the Hindi heading, including Bhojpuri, which alone has more than 50 million speakers, along with Rajasthani and Chhattisgarhi. Many linguists, and many speakers, consider some of these to be languages in their own right.
That does not make the census figure wrong. It does mean “43.63 percent speak Hindi” is a statement about a broad family of related speech, not about one uniform language. Explore our professional document translation services for details.
Where does English fit?
Only about 260,000 people named English as their mother tongue in 2011. Add those who reported it as a second or third language and the figure climbs to roughly one in ten Indians. English is small at home and enormous in offices, universities and courtrooms.
Why Do Other Sources Give Much Higher Numbers?
Step outside the census and the totals jump, because other counters keep the small languages that the 10,000 speaker rule filters out.
- The People’s Linguistic Survey of India, a volunteer project led by scholar Ganesh Devy, reported 780 languages after fieldwork across the country.
- Ethnologue, a standard reference catalog of the world’s languages, lists more than 400 living languages for India.
- The 1961 Census recognized 1,652 mother tongues, a number that still circulates widely.
Underneath every count sits the old question of where a dialect ends and a language begins. There is no purely scientific line, so each survey draws its own.
The languages also come from very different roots. Most Indians speak an Indo-Aryan language such as Hindi, Bengali or Marathi, and roughly a fifth speak a Dravidian language such as Telugu, Tamil, Kannada or Malayalam. Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman languages make up small but very diverse shares. Some of these tongues are ancient, as our look at the first languages in the world explains. Explore our multilingual translation services for details.
What India’s Language Count Means for Translation
For anyone handling Indian paperwork, the practical lesson is simple: “translate it from Indian” is not a thing. A birth certificate from Chennai is likely to be in Tamil, one from Kolkata in Bengali, and one from Ahmedabad in Gujarati, each in its own script. Many records mix a state language with English on the same page.
Before you request a translation, check which language and script your document actually uses, and make sure the translator works in that exact pair. Names deserve extra care, because the same name can be spelled several ways in the Roman alphabet. If the document is headed to a US school, court or immigration office, you will usually need a certified translation that includes a signed statement of accuracy from the translator.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many official languages does India have?
At the national level, India has two official languages for Union government business: Hindi, written in the Devanagari script, and English. Separately, the Constitution’s Eighth Schedule recognizes 22 scheduled languages, and each state can adopt one or more official languages of its own. So the answer is 2 for the central government, 22 on the constitutional list, and a longer combined list once you add every state and union territory.
Does India have a national language?
No. The Constitution of India does not name a national language. Article 343 makes Hindi in the Devanagari script the official language of the Union, and English continues to be used alongside it under the Official Languages Act of 1963. In 2010 the Gujarat High Court noted that no law or order declares Hindi the national language. The belief that Hindi holds that title is common, but it is a myth. Explore our business translation across languages for details.
What is the most spoken language in India?
Hindi is the most spoken language in India. In the 2011 Census, about 528 million people, or 43.63 percent of the population, reported Hindi as their mother tongue. That figure includes many related mother tongues grouped under Hindi, such as Bhojpuri and Rajasthani. Bengali is second with about 97 million speakers, followed by Marathi, Telugu and Tamil.
Is English an official language of India?
Yes. English is one of the two official languages of the Union government, together with Hindi, and it is the working language of the Supreme Court. It is not one of the 22 scheduled languages, though. Very few Indians speak it as a mother tongue, around 260,000 in the 2011 Census, but many millions use it as a second or third language in education, business and government.
Why do different sources give different numbers for India’s languages?
Because they count different things. The census recorded 19,569 raw mother tongue names, reduced them to 1,369 recognized mother tongues, and then grouped those with 10,000 or more speakers into 121 languages. The Constitution lists 22 scheduled languages. Independent projects such as the People’s Linguistic Survey of India include very small communities and report 780. Every figure is defensible once you know its definition.
Need a Document Translated From an Indian Language?
Whether your paperwork is in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi or another Indian language, Click For Translation can match it with a human translator who knows that language and script. Tell us what you have through our quick chat and quote page, or call 1-800-230-7918. You can also browse the full range of languages we translate.
