he 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-Iranian 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.
The second largest language family is the Dravidian family, accounting for some 200 million speakers, or 26%. Families with smaller
numbers of speakers are Austroasiatic and numerous smallTibeto-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 Bantu language Sidi was spoken until the mid-20th century in Gujarat.
Most languages in the Indian republic are written in Brahmi-derived scripts, such
as Devanagari, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Oriya, Eastern Nagari - Assamese/Bengali, etc., though Urdu is written in a script derived
from Arabic, and a few minor languages such as Santali use independent scripts.
The language families in India aren't necessarily related to the various ethnic groups in India, specifically the Indo and Dravidian
peoples. The languages within each family have been influenced to a large extent by both families. For example, many of the South
Indian languages; specifically Malayalam and Telugu, have been highly influenced by Sanskrit (an Indo language). The current
vocabulary of those languages include between 70-80% of Sanskritized content in their purest form.
Urdu has also had a significant influence on many of today's Indian languages. Many North Indian languages have lost much of their
Sanskritized base (50% current vocabulary) to a more Urdu-based form. In terms of the written script, most Indian languages, with
the exception of the Tamil script nearly perfectly accommodate the Sanskrit language. South Indian languages have adopted new
letters to write various Indo-Aryan based words as well, and have added new letters to their native alphabets as the languages
began to mix and influence each other.
Though various Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages may seem mutually exclusive when first heard, there is a much deeper
underlying influence that both language families have had on each other down to a linguistic science. There is proof of the
intermixing of Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages through the pockets of Dravidian based languages on remote areas of Pakistan,
and interspersed areas of North India. In addition, there is a whole science regarding the tonal and cultural expression within the
languages that are quite standard across India. Languages may have different vocabulary, but various hand and tonal gestures
within two unrelated languages can still be common due to cultural amalgamations between invading people and the natives over
time; in this case, the Indo-Aryan peoples and the native Dravidian peoples.
Official languages[edit]
Main article: Languages with official status in India Eighth Schedule to the Constitution
The official languages of the Union Government (not the entire country) are Hindi and English. According to the article 343 (1) of
the Constitution of India, "The Official Language of the Union government shall be Hindi in Devanagari script."
[21]
The
individual states can legislate their own official languages, depending on their linguistic demographics. For example, the state
of Andhra Pradesh has Telugu as its official language, the state of Karnataka has Kannada as its sole official language, the state
of Gujarat has Gujarati as its sole official language, the state ofMaharashtra has Marathi as its sole official language, the state
of Punjab has Punjabi as its sole official language, the state of Odisha has Odiya as its sole official language, the state of Tamil
Nadu has Tamil as its sole official language, while the state of Kerala has Malayalam and English as its official languages, the state
of Jammu and Kashmir has Kashmiri, Urdu, and Dogri as its official languages.
Article 345 of the constitution authorizes the several states of India to adopt as "official languages" of that state which people of
that state can then use in all dealings with all branches of the local, state and federal governments either Hindi or any one or
more of the languages spoken in that state. Until the Twenty-First Amendment of the Constitution in 1967, the country recognised
14 official regional languages. The Eighth Schedule and the Seventy-First Amendment provided for the inclusion
of Sindhi, Konkani, Meiteilon and Nepali, thereby increasing the number of official regional languages of India to 18. At present there
are 22 official languages of India.
[22]
Individual states, whose borders are mostly drawn on socio-linguistic lines, are free to decide
their own language for internal administration and education.
The table below lists the 22 languages set out in the eighth schedule as of May 2008, together with the regions where they are
used.
Even though English language is not included in Eighth Schedule (as it is a foreign language), it is one of the official langu