Facts about Indian languages | Fusion - WeRIndia

The linguistic diversity of India is unmatched by any other country. As of now, there are 22 official languages in India. Here are some great facts about the many languages of India.

Do you know that Hindi is the second most spoken language in the world? It is even ahead of English and Spanish. Not only that, Bengali is the seventh most spoken language and Punjabi the 10th. There are more than 970 million people in the world who speak Hindi. Bengal has around 250 million speakers and Punjabi 120 million speakers worldwide. This puts them ahead of many popular languages like German and French, and with a rise in the popularity of Indian music and cinema, an increasing number of people are deciding to learn Bengali, Hindi, or Punjabi as a foreign language.

Throughout the history, Hindi has been known by many different names. Initially it was known as Apabhramsa. Kalidasa wrote a romantic play called ‘Vikramorvashiyam’ in Apabhramsa in 400 AD.

The longest palindrome (spells the same both forward and backward) in the English language is ’Malayalam’. It is the language spoken in the southern state of Kerala.

The family that only speaks Sanskrit is in Mumbai and there is a Gujarati family whose members speak only in Sanskrit. That’s not it; Mattur in Karnataka is a village where everyone speaks only Sanskrit.

There is a Dravidian language called Brahui which originated from India. It is spoken by approximately 1 million people in Pakistan and Afghanistan. February 21 has been declared as the International Mother Language Day by UNESCO in 1999. This was done to commemorate the Bengali Language Movement in 1952.

The popular language Urdu has 99 percent of its verbs based on Sanskrit and Prakrit. A budget of $114 million has been allocated by the former President of USA, George Bush for the purpose of teaching Hindi in the US. The plan was to make Hindi a part of curriculum. However, the plan was not carried out after Obama became President.

Image Credit:- Jure Snoj, Call of Travel / CC BY-SA

Image Reference: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Indian-languages-map.jpg