list of indian languages by total speakers

Indian languages spoken by more than ten million people are given below. English is spoken as a second language by somewhere between 50 and 250 million Indians. This data has been extracted from the Ethnologue database. This list takes into account native speakers only. Most languages spoken in India belong either to the Indo-Aryan (ca. 74%), the Dravidian (ca. 24%), the Austroasiatic (Munda) (ca. 1.2%), or the Tibeto-Bruman (ca. 0.6%) families, with some languages of the Himalayas still unclassified. The English language, introduced by the British Empire playing an important role as a lingua franca not tied to a specific Indian ethnicity. The official figure of 'mother tongues' spoken in India is 1,683, of which an estimated 850 are in daily use. The SIL Ethnologue lists 387 living languages for India. Ordered by number of speakers:

Hindi: 180 million, Urdu: 46 million (plus around 200 million second-language speakers)
Bengali: 67 million
Telugu: 66 million (Dravidian)
Marathi: 65 million
Tamil: 59 million (Dravidian) (classical)
Gujarati: 43 million
Malayalam: 34 million (Dravidian)
Kannada: 34 million (Dravidian)
Oriya: 30 million
Punjabi: 26 million
Bhojpuri: 23 million
Maithili: 22 million
Awadhi: 20 million
Assamese: 15 million
Haryanvi: 13 million
Marwari: 12 million
Chhattisgarhi: 11 million
Magahi: 11 million
Deccan: 11 million

List Of Indian Languages By Total Speakers

Other significant languages

External links

See also