LANGUAGE

Many different languages are spoken in India. The main ones are Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, and Urdu.

That India has a fascinating diversity of languages unlike anywhere else in the world, with 780 languages reported in our volumes and maybe another 100 or so which we were not able to report. So it is like having about 900 living languages in a country, which is very exciting news.

In all the states and union territories, invariably, there are at least 10 languages or more, but in urban spaces, like Delhi or Bombay, or Hyderabad or Bangalore, nearly 300 language communities inhabit that space in a very substantial number for each community. In the northeast, there are more than 250 languages.

In this countries have rich language diversity are:

Papua New Guinea. There is a claim that there can be perhaps 1,100 languages in that country.  But the demographic statistics do not bear out that claim.

The next is Indonesia, which had, at least 40 years back, 800 languages.

Then comes Nigeria, which has about 350 languages.