hello everyone welcome to the langfocus channel and my name is paul today we're going to talk about one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world that country is india the exact number of languages spoken among india's 1.3 billion people is hard to pinpoint exactly different sources give different numbers and that's partly because they have different ideas about what can be classified as a separate language as opposed to a dialect according to ethnologue there are 448 languages according to the people's linguistic survey of india there are 780 languages and then there's the indian census data on the indian census people can call their mother tongue whatever they want and there was a total of 19 569 different language names among the responses of course that's way too high there aren't even that many languages in the whole world some people probably just call the same language by different names depending on their locality or ethnicity those 19569 names were grouped into 1 369 mother tongues and each of those mother tongues are further grouped under one of 121 languages but that only includes languages with 10 000 or more speakers so there must be more india has two official languages at the national level hindi and english there are also 22 scheduled languages each state or union territory of india is free to choose its own official language or languages and these are recognized and encouraged by the national government most of the languages of india fall into either of two families the indo-aryan family a branch of the indo-european language family which is predominant in northern india and the dravidian language family which is predominant in southern india the remainder mostly belonged to the austro-asiatic sino-tibetan and thai kadai language families these are the top 10 most spoken languages in india according to the census for each language the numbers include all of the mother tongues associated with that language if we define the language more narrowly then the numbers might be lower for each language for example the total for hindi includes the languages of the hindi belt the area where hindi proper forms a dialect continuum with related languages like the rajasthani languages and most of the bihari languages and the pahadi languages these languages are linguistically distinct from hindi but are closely related to it and since hindi is the main official language in the states of the hindi belt people often think of their languages as local varieties of hindi it does not however include urdu even though urdu and hindi are essentially the same language with different standard forms for more information about the relationship between hindi and urdu check out my video on that subject from a couple of years ago the dravidian languages the origin of the dravidian languages is not known and they share no clear links with any other language family however there are theories that the dravidian languages could be linked with the uralic language family including hungarian and finnish or the disputed altaic language family which includes turkish mongolian korean and japanese it's generally thought that dravidian was present in india before the arrival of the indo-european language more than 3500 years ago the oldest existing dravidian writings are the tamil brahmi inscriptions some of which date back to the 3rd or 4th century bce and some more recently discovered inscriptions may be even older and the extensive tamil literary tradition goes back earlier than 300 bce though we don't have original inscriptions of those there are also inscriptions with some telugu words that date from sometime between 400 bce and 100 bce there are also fragments of the kannada language dating back to the 3rd century bce keep in mind that these are just the oldest inscriptions and literature that we know about the languages are certainly older than that but of course they've all developed a lot since those early days a few features of dravidian languages in terms of grammar dravidian languages are agglutinative the root word comes first and suffixes are attached to add meaning this sentence means i eat mango non mambaram sapidurain this is the root verb meaning eat this suffix shows the present tense and this suffix shows the first person singular now in the future tense i will eat mango non mambaram here's the verb root this suffix indicates future tense and again this is first person singular the most common word order is sov as we just saw in those sentences above but the word order is flexible the major dravidian languages have all been significantly influenced by sanskrit the ancient indo-aryan language in which the hindu scriptures and classical epics like the ramayana and mahabharata were written for kannada telugu and malayalam i've seen claims that sanskrit words account for 65 to 80 of the vocabulary but i'm not sure there's a way to calculate that with precision it's true that in writing and an educated speech a lot of sanskrit words are used but much less so in the rural areas and among less literate people tamil is the most conservative of the major dravidian languages and has been influenced by sanskrit the least this has contributed to the myth that tamil is the mother of all the dravidian languages but that's not the case all dravidian languages including tamil trace back to a proto-dravidian language though malayalam developed from a dialect of tamil or a language very closely related to tamil and then became sanskritized the indo-aryan languages while the dravidian languages have been influenced by sanskrit the indo-aryan languages are directly descended from sanskrit sanskrit one of the oldest indo-european languages goes back at least 3500 years it continues on in its classical form as a liturgical and literary language to this day but sanskrit and its associated dialects developed over time into procrits middle indo-aryan languages that were divergent from sanskrit these procreate languages then developed into the indo-aryan languages of northern india much in the same way that latin developed into vulgar latin and then into the romance languages while much literature was written in the various procreates of each region classical sanskrit remained the language of high culture throughout the indian subcontinent the name prakrit comes from the sanskrit word prakrita meaning unrefined or natural because they were naturally arising vernacular forms of language the name sanskrit comes from the sanskrit word samskrita meaning perfected or refined because sanskrit was an ideal or standardized literary language most indians will tell you that sanskrit maintained this status because it enables us to communicate with precision one well-known procreate is pauli which is widely studied because it's the language of the teravada buddhist scriptures in the language of buddha himself was likely either pali or the closely related maghadi prakrit magadhi prakrit is one of the three major prakrits from which the modern indo-aryan languages are thought to descend magadhi is the ancestor of the eastern indo-aryan languages including bengali and others sharasini prakrit is the ancestor of the central indo-aryan languages which include the hindi languages maharashtri prakrit is the ancestor of the southern indo-aryan languages including konkani marathi as well as sinhala of sri lanka and dhihavi of the maldives just as the dravidian languages have been influenced by sanskrit the indo-european languages have also been influenced by dravidian languages due to contact over the millennia even sanskrit contains some dravidian vocabulary phonetic influence and grammatical influence but influence has also taken place over time since then due to continuous contact especially in languages bordering the dravidian areas like marathi and odia marathi for example contains a significant amount of agglutination which is a dravidian feature we saw earlier and it contains a lot of dravidian vocabulary but some degree of this kind of influence extends throughout northern india there has indeed been a large south asian sprachbund an area in which various languages influence each other as part of the indo-european language family the indo-aryan languages are not agglutinative like the dravidian languages but rather fusional with some being more analytic than others in other words having fewer inflections interestingly the indo-aryan family contains only one tonal language punjabi one of the few tonal indo-european languages one important feature of the indo-aryan languages is that they were all significantly influenced by persian and to a lesser extent turkic and arabic because of centuries of largely turkic muslim rule the delhi sultanate first introduced the persian language and its literary tradition in the 13th century and this continued with the mughal empire from the 16th century up until the beginning of british rule persian was the official language of the empire the lingua franca of the elite and a prestigious literary language here are a few simple examples of everyday words in hindi that came from persian the word for vegetable sabzi comes from persian sabzi the word for book ketab comes from persian and ultimately came from the arabic word kitab the word for fresh or new comes from persian the word for warm garam comes from persian those are just a few examples of the many words that are used it's interesting to note that in urdu these words are the same but look exactly like the persian words because urdu is written in the perso arabic script urdu is the indian language that is most heavily influenced by persian standard hindi and urdu both developed from the same kadibuli dialect of delhi but while standard hindi is more sanskritized urdu is more persianized and arabized there was much less persian influence on the dravidian languages that's probably because northern india was more consistently under muslim control than the south it's also probably because the indo-aryan languages are closer to persian to begin with sino-tibetan two of the 22 scheduled languages are sino-tibetan languages boro and mete also known as manipuri boro is co-official in the himalayan state of assam and official in its borderland autonomous region which borders bhutan mete is the official language of the state of manipur which borders myanmar the many sino-tibetan languages in northeastern india belong to the tibeto-burman sub-family and are grouped geographically into a branch of tibeto-burman but the exact relationship between many of these languages is unclear northeastern india is the most linguistically diverse area of the country with around 75 percent of the country's languages despite its relatively small area and population many of the languages also feature great dialectal variation with sometimes low mutual intelligibility making it necessary to use a separate lingua franca for communication boro and mete function as lingua francas between the various linguistic communities in their respective areas but a more widely used lingua franca is assamese the eastern most indo-european language and the other official language of assam there are also assam-based pidgin and creole languages notably nagamese in the state of nagaland while its vocabulary is based on assamese its grammar is rooted in tibeto-burman languages in arunachal pradesh where as many as 50 tibeto-burman languages are spoken english is the only official language while hindi is the main lingua franca tibeto-burman languages are also spoken in makaleya but the official language of the state is english and the most widely spoken native language is kasi an austroasiatic language one of the 22 scheduled languages santali is also an austroasiatic language it's a recognized regional language spoken in a number of states in eastern and northeastern india there are numerous other languages in india belonging to the same munda branch of austroasiatic austroasiatic doesn't sound indigenous to india does it the austroasiatic language family is the family that includes vietnamese and the khmer language of cambodia it's thought that speakers of languages arrived in india more than 3500 years ago santali had no written language until the 19th century a special script called old chiki was created specifically for the suntali language scripts are one of the most intriguing aspects of india's linguistic diversity according to the people's linguistic survey of india 66 different scripts are used most of the languages use scripts derived from the ancient brahmi script the oldest readable script of the subcontinent the only one older than the brahmi script is the indus script symbols appearing in inscriptions that date back as far as 5500 years ago but it's not known whether this is an actual script or just a set of pictorial symbols devanagari this is the most widely used script in india it's used for hindi and a number of other modern languages and is also widely used for sanskrit the gujarati script was developed from deva nagari and is used for writing gujarati the bengali script derived from deva nagari and is used for writing bengali and sometimes meite the assamese script is nearly identical to the bengali script and is used to write the assamese language the gurmukhi script is used to write punjabi then there are dravidian scripts which also derive from the brahmi script the tamil script is used to write tamil telugu also has its own script and the kannada language has a script that's very similar malayalam also has its own script all of these dravidian scripts are also used to write a number of minority languages and sanskrit in their respective regions all of these brahmi-derived scripts are abugida scripts scripts in which vowels are connected to a base consonant and the two can't be separated even though these scripts all derived from the same source being able to read one doesn't mean you can read the others without first learning them and that brings me to an important question with all of this linguistic diversity how do indians communicate with people who speak different native languages well my understanding is that in northern india because the indo-aryan languages are closely related they can become mutually intelligible through exposure but without exposure their speakers can probably just pick out certain words in the other language many non-hindi speakers can understand hindi through exposure even though they may not be able to speak it very well so if they talk to a hindi speaker then there may be one-way intelligibility or asymmetric intelligibility but if the hindi speaker learns to understand their language through exposure then they may speak to each other in their own languages and understand each other but many indians are multilingual so they might fully communicate in hindi or in the other language or they might communicate in english english becomes even more important when indo-aryan speakers communicate with dravidian speakers since their native languages are very different and there may be some pride that prevents them from speaking the other language of course this is also true for the other languages belonging to the sino-tibetan and austroasiatic families among others and it's worth emphasizing that every state or area has many languages spoken but one particular language might dominate and be used as a lingua franca and it may not be hindi or english it might be the official language of that state or it might be the most predominant language in that area but many indians have told me that in general they just tend to spend more time with people who speak the same language as them the question of the day for people from india what's your native language and what other languages do you know in what situations do you use them and to people who have visited india assuming you tried to speak english there how well were you able to communicate with people in english leave your answers in the comments below this video if you enjoyed this video be sure to check out the various langfocus social media accounts and once again thank you to all of my wonderful patreon supporters especially these people right here on the screen they are my top tier patreon supporters so many special thanks to them and to everyone thank you for watching and have a nice day [Music] you