Language Atlas of India 1991

Mother tongue was defined as the language spoken in childhood by the person's mother to the person. If the mother died in infancy, the language mainly spoken in the person's home in childhood will be the mother tongue. In case of infants and deaf mutes the language usually spoken by the mother should be recorded. In case of doubt, the language mainly spoken in the household may be recorded”.

The Census of 1991 recorded 10,400 mother tongue names. Through the scrutiny of this data, a master list of 3,372 rationalised names of mother tongues was prepared, of which 1,576 were more or less classified and the remaining 1,796 were unclassified and relegated to the ‘Others’ category.

The national rate of bilingualism is 19.44 per cent as per the Census of 1991. The national rate of trilingualism is 7.26 per cent as per the Census of 1991. 

The languages of India have been divided into four distinct families. Among all speakers, 75.30 per cent people speak Indo-European languages, 22.53 per cent speak Dravidian languages, 1.13 per cent speak Austro-Asiatic languages, and 0.97 per cent speak Tibeto-Burmese languages. 

The largest language family in India is the Indo-European family, which occupies a three-fourth share of India’s language population. The languages spoken in the family include Sanskrit, Persian, Bengali, Marathi, Sindhi, Urdu, and more.

Hindi is one of the major languages in 18 out of the 31 states/union territories of the country (excluding Jammu & Kashmir). Uttar Pradesh has the highest number of Hindi speakers in the country, amounting to nearly 125,348,492 speakers.

As per Census 1991, there are 178,598 English speakers in India who account for 0.02 per cent of the total population. These speakers returned English as their mother tongue in the survey. Nearly 47.28 per cent of them live in Maharashtra, followed by 12.72 per cent in Tamil Nadu, 8.78 per cent in Karnataka, and 8.62 per cent in West Bengal.

Focus and Factoids by Karen Chhaya.