The Languages of India belong to several language families, the major ones being the Indo-Aryan languages spoken

by 73% of Indians and the Dravidian languages spoken by 24% of Indians.

[4] [1][2]

Other languages
[3]

spoken in India belong to the Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burman, and a few minor language families and isolates. The Republic of India does not have a National language.
[5]

However, the official languages of the Union Government The constitution of India states that "The official
[7]

of Republic of India isHindi in the Devanagari script and English. language of the Union shall be Hindi inDevanagari script."
[6]

a position supported by a High Court ruling.

However,

languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian constitution are sometimes referred to, without legal standing, [8][9] as the national languages of India. In addition, some individual stateslegislate their own official languages, depending on their linguistic demographics. Individual mother tongues in India number several hundreds;
[10] [11]

the 1961 census recognized 1,652

(SIL

Ethnologue lists 415). According to Census of India of 2001, 30 languages are spoken by more than a million native speakers, 122 by more than 10,000. More than three millennia of language contact has led to significant mutual influence among the four language families in India and South Asia. Two contact languages have played an important role in the history of India: Persian and English.
[12]

History[edit]

The Hindi-belt, including Hindi-related languages such as Rajasthani and Bihari.

Main article: Linguistic history of India The northern Indian languages from the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family evolved from Old Indic by way of the Middle Indic Prakritlanguages and Apabhraa of the Middle Ages. There is no consensus for a specific time where the modern north Indian languages such asHindustani, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Sindhi and Oriya emerged, but AD 1000 is [13][page needed] commonly accepted. Each language had different influences, with Hindustani being strongly influenced by Persian. The Dravidian languages of South India had a history independent of Sanskrit. The major Dravidian languages are Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannadaand Tulu.
[14]

Though Malayalam and Telugu are Dravidian in origin, over

[15][16][17][18] [19]

eighty percent of their lexicon is borrowed from Sanskrit.

The Telugu script can reproduce the full range of

[20][21]

Sanskrit phonetics without losing any of the text's originality,

whereas the Malayalam script The

includesgraphemes capable of representing all the sounds of Sanskrit and all Dravidian languages.

Kannada language has lesser Sanskrit and Prakrit influence and the Tamil language the least.
needed]

[citation [cit

The Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman languages of North-East India also have long independent histories.