Indian Languages

I

Introduction

Indian Languages, the several hundred indigenous languages spoken on the Indian subcontinent, the vast majority of which belong either to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family or to the non-Indo-European Dravidian family. A much smaller representation of languages belongs to the Austro-Asiatic, Tai-Kadai, and Sino-Tibetan language families.

II

Official Languages

No one common language is spoken on the Indian subcontinent. Hindi is the official language of India, while English is officially recognized for official purposes such as government proceedings. In addition, the Indian constitution recognizes 18 state languages, which are used in schools and in official transactions. These are Assamese, Bangla, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sindhi, Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada (Kanarese), Malayalam, and Nepali, Konkani, and Manipuri, which were all added to the 1992 constitution. In Pakistan, the official language is English, though Urdu and Sindhi are national languages; the official language of Bangladesh is Bangla.

III

Indo-Iranian Languages

At about the beginning of the 2nd millennium bc the Indo-Iranians migrated eastwards, away from the other Indo-European peoples, and settled in Iran. By about 1000 bc, the two language branches, Indic (also called Indo-Aryan) and Iranian, had probably separated, with Iranian being spoken around Iran and Afghanistan and Indic developing in north-western India (see Indo-Iranian Languages). The Indic speakers must have encountered Dravidian speakers in northern India; the original Dravidians were either overrun or forced to move southwards on the peninsula, where they are found today.

The history of the Indic language branch is often divided into three main stages: (1) Old Indic, comprising Vedic and classical Sanskrit; (2) Middle Indic (from c. 3rd century bc), which embraces the vernacular dialects of Sanskrit called Prakrits, including Pali; and (3) New, or Modern, Indic (from c. 10th century ad), which comprises the modern languages of the northern and central portions of the Indian subcontinent.

Vedic Sanskrit, the language used in the Vedas, the sacred Hindu scriptures, is the earliest form of Sanskrit, dating from about 1500 bc to about 200 bc. A later variety of the language, classical Sanskrit (from c. 500 bc), was a language of literary and technical works. Even today, it is still widely studied in India and functions as a sacred and learned language.

The Middle Indic Prakrits existed in many regional varieties, which eventually developed literatures of their own. Pali, the language of the Buddhist canonical writings, is the oldest literary Prakrit. It remains in liturgical use in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Thailand.

The Prakrits continued in everyday use until about the 12th century ad, but even by about the 10th century, the Modern Indic vernaculars had begun to develop. Collectively, these languages are spoken today by more than 400 million people. The number of languages is difficult to specify. Roughly 35 are of some significance, particularly Hindi, Urdu, Bangla, Gujarati, Punjabi, Marathi, Bihāri, Oriya, and Rajasthani, each of which has more than 10 million speakers.

Despite their separate names, Hindi and Urdu are actually slightly different dialects of the same language. The main differences lie in their vocabulary sources, scripts, and religious traditions. Hindi vocabulary derives mainly from Sanskrit, while Urdu contains many words of Persian and Arabic origin; Hindi is written in the Devanagari script, and Urdu in a Persian Arabic script. Hindi is spoken mainly by Hindus; Urdu is used predominantly by Muslims—in India as well as throughout Pakistan.

Two major varieties of Hindi are spoken; together they have about 180 million speakers. Western Hindi, which originated in the area around Delhi, includes literary Hindi and Urdu. Eastern Hindi is spoken mainly in central Uttar Pradesh and eastern Madhya Pradesh; its most important literary works are in the Awadhi language. (Hindustani is an older term, used less and less frequently since partition in 1947. It referred to the mixed Western Hindi-Urdu language that developed in the camps and marketplaces around Delhi, was spread throughout India from the 16th to 18th century, and functioned as a lingua franca among the different language groups.) Bangla, spoken in West Bengal and by almost the entire population of Bangladesh, ranks sixth worldwide in numbers of speakers (about 120 million). Like Hindi, it is descended from Sanskrit. It is the language of the poet Rabindranath Tagore, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1913), and has the most extensive literature of any modern Indian language.

Punjabi (Panjabi), spoken in the Punjab, a region covering parts of north-eastern India and western Pakistan, was the language of the gurus, the founders of the Sikh religion. The sacred teachings of Sikhism are recorded in Punjabi in the Gurmukhi script, which was devised by a Sikh guru. In India, Punjabi is close to the Hindi language; to the west, in Pakistan, Punjabi dialects differ markedly.

Bihāri is actually the name of a group of 12 related languages—Bhojpuri, Maithili, and Magahi being the main ones—spoken mainly in north-eastern India in Bihar. Despite their approximately 60 million speakers, the Bihāri languages are not constitutionally recognized languages of India. Even in Bihar, Hindi is the language used for educational and official matters.

Other significant Indic languages include Sinhala, the official language of Sri Lanka; and the many Romani languages, the languages of the Roma (Gypsies) that originated in India and were spread throughout the world. The Sanskrit origin of Romani is apparent in its sounds and grammar.

The origin of most scripts for the Indic languages can ultimately be traced to Brahmi, which is of North Semitic derivation. Devanagari, a development of Brahmi, is used for Nepali, Marathi, and Kashmiri (by Hindus), as well as for Hindi, Sanskrit, and the Prakrits. Gujarati, Bangla, Assamese, and Oriya all have individual writing systems derived from Devanagari. A Persian Arabic script is used for Urdu, Sindhi (also written in Devanagari), and Punjabi.

IV

Dravidian Languages

Seventy-five Dravidian languages are spoken by about 246 million people, mainly in southern India. The four major Dravidian tongues are recognized as official state languages—Tamil in Tamil Nadu, Telugu in Andhra Pradesh, Kannada (Kanarese) in Mysore, and Malayalam in Kerala. They have long literary histories and are written in their own scripts. Telugu is spoken by the largest number of people; Tamil has the richest literature, which was once thought to be extremely ancient but is now believed to date from about the 1st to the 5th century ad, and it is spoken over the widest area, including north-western Sri Lanka. Other Dravidian languages have fewer speakers and are, for the most part, not written. The Dravidian languages have acquired many loanwords from the Indic languages, especially from Sanskrit. Conversely, the Indic languages have borrowed Dravidian sounds and grammatical structures.