essay on national language of india

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The debate on the national language:

GS Paper 2:

Topics Covered: Important Constitutional Amendments.

Remarks by a Hindi actor to the effect that Hindi is the national language of India sparked a controversy recently over the status of the language under the Constitution.

Is there any national language?

The Constitution of India has not given any language a national status.

What is the status of Hindi?

Under Article 343 of the Constitution , the official language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagari script. The international form of Indian numerals will be used for official purposes.

• In the constituent assembly discussions, it was decided that English would continue to be used for a period of 15 years.
• The Constitution said that after 15 years, Parliament may by law decide on the use of English and the use of the Devanagari form of numbers for specified purposes.

Article 351:

It is the Union government’s duty to promote the spread of Hindi so that it becomes “a medium of expression for all elements of the composite culture of India” and also to assimilate elements of forms and expressions from Hindustani and languages listed in the Eighth Schedule.

Why was there opposition to the imposition of Hindi?

• The Official Languages Act, 1963 was passed in anticipation of the expiry of the 15-year period during which the Constitution originally allowed the use of English for official purposes.
• Its operative section provided for the continuing use of English, notwithstanding the expiry of the 15-year period.
• Jawaharlal Nehru had given an assurance in 1959 that English would remain in official use and as the language of communication between the Centre and the States.
• The Official Languages Act, 1963, did not explicitly incorporate this assurance, causing apprehensions in some States as the January 1965 deadline neared.
• At that time, PM Lal Bahadur Shastri reiterated the government’s commitment to move towards making Hindi the official language for all purposes.
• It created an apprehension that Hindi would be imposed in such a way that the future employment prospects of those who do not speak Hindi will be bleak.

Imposing the Hindi language:

• Can affect the learning ability of non-Hindi speakers thereby affecting their self-confidence.
• Can also threaten other languages and reduce diversity.
• Could also threaten the diversity and federalism of India.

What is the three-language formula?

Since the 1960s, the Centre’s education policy documents speak of teaching three languages — Hindi, English and one regional language in Hindi-speaking States, and Hindi, English and the official regional language in other States.

• In practice, however, only some States teach both their predominant language and Hindi, besides English.
• In States where Hindi is the official language, a third language is rarely taught as a compulsory subject.

InstaLinks:

Prelims Link:

• Which states in India have the provision of optional use of Hindi in Court proceedings?
• What is the Eighth schedule of the Indian Constitution?
• What is Article 348 related to?
• Governors’ powers to authorise the use of Hindu in High Court proceedings.
• Who can add or remove languages from the 8th schedule?
• Overview of the Official Languages Act of 1963.

Mains Link:

Discuss why the government should consider amending the Official Languages Act of 1963 to include more vernacular languages in governance, and not just confine it to Hindi and English.

Sources: the Hindu.

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National Language Debate: What Does It Mean for Indian Pluralism?

The language question is not just about imposition but about distortion of an individual's cultural identity. 

The debate over Hindi being India’s  “National Language” has been on since the time the Constitution was being written. It was recently resurrected by the Draft National Education Policy which seems to be giving Hindi more importance than other Indian languages. In fact, the number of native Hindi speakers in India are only  around 44%, which includes speakers of languages such as Bhojpuri. 

The dangers of imposing a language are manifold. It can affect the learning ability of non-native speakers thereby affecting their self-confidence. It can also endanger other languages and dialects and reduce diversity. National integration cannot come at the cost of people’s linguistic identities. Language is integral to culture and therefore privileging Hindi over all other languages spoken in India takes away from its diversity.

This is an argument that has often been put forth by southern states, especially Tamil Nadu, even before independence. In fact, when the draft on the National Education Policy came out, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam President M. K. Stalin  made a statement  where he reminded the centre of Nehru’s promise. This was that Hindi would only serve as a linking language and it would not be imposed on non-Hindi speaking states as long as they were against it. There have also been protests in other southern states, such as in Karnataka, where pro-Kannada outfits like Karnataka Rashna Vedika held  round tables  to discuss how to tackle "Hindi chauvinism". Similar groups such as the Bengal Pokkoh have emerged even in Bengal that are spearheading movements against Hindi imposition. 

This reading list contextualises the long history of the national language debate in India. 

1) Language is a Primary Constituent of Identity 

One of the reasons people feel very strongly about issues related to a national language or the "imposition" of a language is because language is at the core of an individual’s identity. It is in a language that an individual conceptualises and communicates his thoughts which enables him to actively participate in society. In fact, language gives people a  primary group  as people can identify with each other using a language. As Papia Sengupta  says

Language is not simply a tool for communication but is a central and defining feature of identity as all human thoughts are conceptualised through a language and all human values are pronounced and perceived through it. It follows that since language is a significant factor in building one’s identity, it must be preserved.

Furthermore, she  argues  that not knowing the dominant language can have a negative impact on an individual's political identity

Language is the most important tool of participation in the polity of the state and not being able to speak in the dominant language (or languages) of a state can have a serious impact on an individual’s employment, educational and recreational opportunities. This leads to discrimination and injustice

2) The Role of the Constituent Assembly 

The National Language Debate goes all the way back to the time of the Constituent Assembly. It was given the responsibility to debate the language question. However, many scholars such as Rama Kant Agnihotri  believe  that the assembly debates were dominated by a group of elites therefore marginalising the aspirations of the minorities. 

Even though India’s Constituent Assembly debates were informed by remarkable seriousness, scholarship, and integrity, most of the linguistic decisions taken by the Constituent Assembly, in many cases insightful, were located in consensual democracy and the domination of the elites in that body. The multilingual and multicultural ethos that is constitutive of Indian society was ignored. The focus was so much on containing the existing political safeguards available to the religious and backward minorities that the rights of linguistic minorities were compromised

3) The Deceptive Eighth Schedule

As multiple languages were being spoken by state populations of millions across the continent, an elusive solution came forth in the formation of the Eighth schedule. It comprises of a list of official languages and the government is under obligation to ensure their development. However, the Eighth Schedule led to the destruction of mother tongues that were relegated to subordinate positions. Sadhana Saexna  explains  this point when she says:  

The Eight Schedule (ES) takes no cognisance of various languages. Empowering a few has impoverished and marginalised others by exclusion. Consequently, the ES languages have gained power, recognition and prestige as 'mainstream' or 'standard' languages. The others have been left to languish with demeaning labels such as "dialects', 'minor languages', 'tribal languages' and so on. Education, the judiciary, administration, mainstream trade and commerce, national communication networks and media, even most non-government organisations all use the ES languages, totally ignoring the vast majority of Indian mother tongues. Ironically, a foreign language not listed in the ES enjoys maximum prestige.

Speaking of the reaction of the locals to a standardised language, she goes on to  say  that they do recognise its importance, however not at the cost of their own mother tongues being made inferior.

Ordinary people usually come out with clear reasoning. They want to learn the standard language to deal with government officials, otherwise they will not be considered literate and their voice will not be heard. But never do they believe that a standard language will replace their spoken language. The distinction they make is very clear. They want a language of power to acquire power, but not by suppressing their own languages. Obviously, this points to the need to build a multi-language milieu.

4) Language: The Centre of Nationalist Propaganda

Various policies on language have been framed both by the central and state governments that have been termed as forms of linguistic chauvinism. These include making  Bengali compulsory  in school of West Bengal and a pitch of making  Marathi compulsory  in all schools in Maharashtra. Another controversial policy was the three - language formula  in the South.

Papia Sengupta highlights this when she  says :

Such policies threaten the diversity and federalism of India. The states' fear of the central government's ideology of monopolising faith, education, and language will adversely affect the Indian political system, which is based on pluralism and accommodation. The policies of the centre as well as states should be viewed with precaution as they further advance the politics of majoritarianism.

Hany Babul MT takes it a step further. He  says  unilingual policies of governments led to the creation of a "chaturvarna system" of languages that has wrongly divided languages into a hierarchical system.

The Indian language policy is informed by a pull towards unilingual identity, inspired by the European model of nation state that is predicated on the homogeneity of its people. Language hegemony works at two tiers in India—at the state and the centre. The Constitution fails to pay more than lip service to the linguistic plurality and multilingual ethos of the peoples of India and has created a chaturvarna (four-tier order) of languages, with Sanskrit, Hindi, scheduled, and the non-scheduled languages occupying various rungs of the ladder.

S Srinivasa Rao  believes  that the “nationalists” today are bent on promoting linguistic nationalism that sees other Indian languages to be inferior to Hindi.   

If Macaulay and his successors have rubbished the numerous indigenous and minority languages in the name of incivility and lack of richness of literature and, therefore, are not suited for the elitist raj, the nationalist protagonists revealed their similar intentions in the artificial construction of “nationhood” through language.

5) The Emphasis Should Be on Official Languages 

V K R V Rao pleads for a patient and national approach to the problem of language. He asks decision makers to not be clouded by temporary passions or the quest for short period expediencies. He  believes  the focus should not be on establishing one national language, but should be shifted to strengthening the official languages whose importance cannot be disregarded.

National integration in a multilingual country does not require the imposition of one official language on the country, especially when the language selected for the purpose is one of its many regional languages even if it happens to be that of the largest linguistic group in the country. At the same time, the convenience, in fact the necessity, of having one or more languages as the official (not national, as all languages spoken in a country can claim to be national) language or languages for centre-state and inter-state communication for political, economic, legal and even social reasons cannot be disputed.

Truth about Language in India I Santosh Kumar Khare, 2002 Language, Power and Ideology I Tariq Rahman, 2002 The Locations of Hindi I Vasudha Dalmia, 2003

Image Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons /Rohini/ CC BY-SA 4.0

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India National Language: Understanding the Importance of Hindi

India, with its diverse cultural heritage, is a land of many languages but Hindi is the de facto India National Language. The country recognizes 22 official languages, out of which Hindi is the most widely spoken and understood language. In this article, we will explore the history, importance, and controversies surrounding Hindi as India’s national language.

Table of Contents

India National Language: Origins

Hindi is a language with roots dating back to ancient India. The earliest known form of Hindi was Prakrit, a language spoken in the 3rd century BCE. Prakrit eventually evolved into Apabhramsha, which further gave rise to several modern languages, including Hindi. Hindi, as we know it today, is a standardized version of the Khari Boli dialect, spoken in and around Delhi.

Hindi as India National Language

Hindi became the official language of India in 1965, replacing English. This move was made to promote Hindi as a unifying language that would bridge the linguistic divide in the country. However, this decision was met with resistance from some states where Hindi was not widely spoken. To address this concern, the Indian government recognized all 22 official languages, including Hindi, as equal in status.

Today, Hindi is the most widely spoken language in India, with over 40% of the population speaking it as their first language. Hindi is also the language used in the Indian parliament and judiciary, making it an important language for governance.

The Importance of Hindi

Hindi is not just a language but a means of cultural expression. It is the language of Bollywood, India’s thriving film industry, which has made Hindi films popular around the world. Hindi has also contributed to the enrichment of the Indian culture through its literature, poetry, and music.

Hindi is also a language of education and employment. Many schools and universities across India use Hindi as a medium of instruction. Knowledge of Hindi is often a requirement for employment in the Indian government and public sector.

Controversies Surrounding Hindi

Despite its widespread use, Hindi has been a subject of controversy in India. Some states have expressed concern that the promotion of Hindi as a national language would lead to the marginalization of other languages. This has led to protests and demands for greater recognition of regional languages.

Another controversy surrounding Hindi is its association with Hindu nationalism. The use of Hindi as a symbol of national identity has been criticized by some as a means of promoting the Hindu religion and culture, thereby marginalizing other religious and cultural groups in India.

Hindi is an important language in India, both for its cultural significance and its practical uses. It is the de facto national language and an important language for governance, education, and employment. However, its promotion as a national language has been met with resistance, with some states demanding greater recognition of regional languages. Despite the controversies, Hindi remains an integral part of the Indian identity and will continue to play a vital role in the country’s future.

• Is Hindi the only official language of India?

No, India recognizes 22 official languages, of which Hindi is one.

• How many people speak Hindi in India?

Over 40% of the population speaks Hindi as their first language.

• What is the controversy surrounding Hindi as a national language?

Some states have expressed concern that the promotion of Hindi as a national language would lead to the marginalization of other languages. Additionally, its association with Hindu nationalism has been criticized by some as a means of promoting the Hindu religion and culture.

• Is knowledge of Hindi required for employment in the Indian government?

Yes, in many cases, knowledge of Hindi is a requirement for employment in the Indian government and public.

• Can I learn Hindi as a second language?

Yes, Hindi is widely taught as a second language in schools and universities across India. There are also many resources available for learning Hindi online.

• Are there any other languages that are widely spoken in India besides Hindi?

Yes, India is a diverse country with many languages spoken. Besides Hindi, other widely spoken languages in India include Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, and Urdu.

• “Hindi Diwas 2021: What is the history behind celebrating Hindi Diwas?” India Today, 14 September 2021, https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/gk-current-affairs/story/hindi-diwas-2021-what-is-the-history-behind-celebrating-hindi-diwas-1852341-2021-09-14.
• “Languages of India.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 4 April 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India.
• “Hindi Language.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 18 January 2022, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hindi-language.

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Multilingualism in india.

With a growing population of just over 1.3 billion people, India is an incredibly diverse country in many ways. This article will focus specifically on contemporary linguistic di­versity in India, first with an overview of India as a multilingual country just before and after Independence in 1947 and then through a brief outline of impacts of multilingualism on busi­ness and schools, as well as digital, visual, and print media.

India is home to many native languages, and it is also common that people speak and understand more than one language or dialect, which can entail the use of different scripts as well. India’s 2011 census documents that 121 languages are spoken as mother tongues, which is defined as the first lan­guage a person learns and uses.1 Of these languages, the Constitution of India recognizes twenty-two of them as official or “scheduled” languages. Articles 344(1) and 351 of the Constitution of India, titled the Eighth Schedule, recognizes the following languages as official languages of states of India: Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu.2

Six languages also hold the title of classical languages (Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu), which are determined to have a history of recorded use for more than 1,500 years and a rich body of literature. Furthermore, for a contemporary language to also be a classical language, it must be an original language and cannot be a variety, such as a dialect, stemming from another language. Just as there are many people who wish for their mother tongues to be recognized as official, scheduled languages, there are also efforts to add Indian languages to the list of classical languages. Once a language has the official status of a classical language, the Ministry of Education organizes international awards for scholars of those languages, sets up language studies centers, and grants funding to universities to promote the study of the language. Interestingly, the Constitution of India lists no national language for the country as a whole.

Of the official, scheduled languages, Modern Standard Hindi—as an umbrella term for a family of languages—has the most mother tongue speakers, with around 528 million speakers, or 44 percent of India’s population, followed by Bengali with around 97 million speakers, or 8 percent of the popu­lation. Marathi has around 83 million speakers, or 7 percent of the population, and Telugu speakers number around 81 million, or almost 6 percent of the population. Speakers who list the remaining official languages as their mother tongues also number between 2 and 4 percent of the population, as recorded in the 2011 census. It is interesting to note that due to India’s large population, native speakers of these regional Indian languages often outnumber native speakers of other major world languages such as Korean—with 77.2 million native speakers—and Italian—with 67 million native speakers—as of 2020.3

Languages in India are categorized into language families based on their different linguistic or­igins, which often include different scripts as well. The main language families include Dravidian, Indo–Aryan, and Sino–Tibetan. Bodo is the Sino–Tibetan language spoken in northeastern Indian states with the most speakers (1.4 million). Languages considered to be mother tongues or regional languages in the south of India have grammatical structures and scripts with Dravidian roots, and languages used in the central and northern regions of India are part of the Indo–Aryan family of languages. Many central and northern Indian languages use scripts derived from the Nagari script. Contemporary variations of Hindi use the Devanagari script, and scripts used in Gujarati, Punjabi, and Marathi use Nagari-derived scripts or versions of Devanagari that include some differences in their alphabets.

Similarly, Modern Standard Hindi and Urdu are grammatically identical, though they often differ in some vocabulary and their use of scripts, as Urdu uses a modified form of the Perso–Arabic script. As Hindi and Urdu are often considered to be one language with two scripts, a common belief is that the distinction among speaking and writing Hindi and Urdu falls along a religious divide be­tween Hindus and Muslims, where Hindus are listed as Hindi speakers and Muslims as Urdu speak­ers in government documents such as the census.4 However, in practice, the distinction between Hindi and Urdu speakers is much more fluid and complex, as linguistic boundaries rely more on geographic location and speech community.

Another aspect of India’s multilingualism is that each mother tongue, or regional language, roughly belongs to one or more states. India’s twenty-eight states have been largely organized along linguistic lines since the 1950s, just after Independence, with the formation of the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh in 1953 for Telugu speakers. Andhra Pradesh was created after prolonged pro­tests and strikes by Telugu speakers, which included the prominent activist Potti Sreeramulu fasting for the creation of a Telugu state until his death in 1952.5 A new state was finally created in 1953 by dividing the Tamil- and Telugu-speaking regions in what, under the British, was called the Madras Presidency. Immediately after Independence, the country retained similar political divisions it had under colonial rule, which newly independent Indians felt did not accurately represent them in the new government. The state reorganization movement for Andhra Pradesh culminated in the govern­ment-organized Dhar commission, which was ordered to investigate reordering additional Indian state borders along the lines of linguistic communities, or groups of people who speak the same language. The commission produced the State Reorganization Act of 1956, which called for states to be formed to represent linguistic groups rather than to stay the way the country was divided over the course of British rule.

Following the division of the state of Andhra Pradesh and the orders of the State Reorganization Act of 1956, the states of Kerala, Mysore, and Madras were formed. (In 1969, Madras was renamed Tamil Nadu, and in 1973, Mysore was renamed Karnataka.) In 1956 as well, the princely state of Hy­derabad was divided between Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh. Just as the state of Andhra Pradesh was formed after prolonged protests for the rights of Telugu speakers, the Prov­ince of Bombay was also divided between Marathi and Gujarati speakers in 1960 into the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra. The bustling port city of Bombay, later renamed Mumbai in 1995, became part of the state of Maharashtra. Large reorganization efforts along the lines of language and reli­gious communities continued with the 1966 reorganization of Patiala and East Punjab States Union (PEPSU) and Punjab into three new states, Punjab, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh; and India’s northeastern region also underwent a linguistic and communal reorganization into different states between the years of 1963 and 1987.

Multilingualism in India has therefore played a key role in the country’s contemporary politics. State boundaries were drawn along the lines of language groups, even though regions remain lin­guistically diverse, because languages in India can be an important way of defining one’s identity. Many people in different Indian regions in cultural and religious groups retain distinct identities that set them apart from other communities through language. As India is culturally, ethnically, and religiously diverse, language is one way people maintain group identities. Identity politics have also made mother tongues an object and mode of political struggle. Authors of the State Reorganization Act felt that democratic participation would grow if local populaces could access information and participate in government programs in their mother tongues. Language is a basis of identity and is why, when state boundaries were being redrawn after Independence in 1947, languages and the areas in which they were spoken were utmost factors of importance in where the boundaries of new Indian states would be.

Today, there are twenty-eight states in India and eight union territories, or areas directly gov­erned by the federal government, and each state has at least one official language and many have two, in addition to English. In this way, with unique languages and scripts attributed to each state, India often seems like a collection of distinct countries due to the cultural and linguistic differences between states. Due to this vast diversity in languages and the way language is closely tied to identity, sometimes there are also struggles along religious and political lines that play out through language. Hindu nationalists engage in movements to spread the use of Hindi and Sanskrit as a means to spread the Hindu religion as well. Some have also felt that the distinct regional languages of states should indicate that people who do not speak those languages from birth should not be allowed to reside and work in states where they do not belong to the linguistic community. This was the message of the conservative party, the Shiv Sena, in Maharashtra.

English as an Indian Language

Adding to the complexity of the history of languages in South Asia, the English language was also integrated into the social fabric of the region insofar as it played a key role as a unifying language in the Constitution among north and south India at the time of Independence in 1947. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948), also known by the name Mahatma, which means “Great Soul,” was a famous activist who led many Indians in peaceful protests against British rule. Gandhi and his supporters made concessions for the English language to remain in use in the new nation. They found English incredibly useful for unifying the country despite their support for Hindustani, the name for the mix of Hindi and Urdu commonly used in the northern regions of India, as the national language.

Paradoxically for Gandhi and his supporters, English represented a dividing force that emphasized the distance between educated Indian elites, who were more aligned with British colonizers, and non-En­glish-speaking, often-uneducated masses. Gandhi maintained that to have a successful Independence movement was to govern through Indian ways, including through Indian regional languages. During the late colonial period, Gandhi addressed audiences from 1916 to 1928 over English linguistic colo­nization in education. He called for education in regional languages, stating, “The question of vernac­ulars as media of instruction is of national importance,” and he criticized how “English-educated In­dians are the sole custodians of public and patriotic work”; he also said the “neglect of the vernaculars means national suicide.”6 However, the question of a national unifying language at Independence was a complicated one, as Gandhi’s call for Hindustani to wholly replace English was also rejected. Hin­dustani, later known as a variety of Hindi and Urdu, is not commonly spoken across all of India, and it is considered a northern Indian regional language since it is distinct from the language families and scripts used in south India. English, therefore, served as a utilitarian language to connect disparate and diverse areas of the newly unified country, as it still does today. Now, Indian English, with a unique vocabulary and accent, is a recognized variety of English in the world.

Ultimately, the English language was written into India’s new Constitution as a language to help with the new country’s transition from a British colonial subject to independent governance. Specifi­cally, the 1949 original Constitution of India states that “business in Parliament shall be transacted in Hindi or in English” in Article 210, Article 343 states that “the official language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagari script” and “for a period of fifteen years from the commencement of this Con­stitution, the English language shall continue to be used for all the official purposes of the Union for which it was being used immediately before such commencement: provided that the president may, during the said period, by order authorize the use of the Hindi language in addition to the English language.”7 The intention of including English as a language for official government purposes along with Hindi was that English would be shed as the new nation matured.

In 1963, the impending transition away from English brought about similar concerns over the need for a unifying language, which were voiced at the time of Independence. Parliament enacted the Official Languages Act of 1963 to continue the use of English and section 3 of the act extended the implementation of English for official purposes along with Hindi.8 India decided to keep English as a unifying language to connect parts of the country where Modern Standard Hindi is not commonly spoken, such as in the southern Indian states with different scripts and language roots. While English is also a legacy of the British in India, it remains a tool and window through which to gain wider knowledge and understanding of the country. English also connects India with other English-speak­ing regions of the world.

Multilingualism in Daily Life

As there are many languages in India, many Indians can speak, read, and/or write in multiple lan­guages, and multilingualism therefore is a part of daily life. Challenges and advantages of linguistic diversity affect the everyday lives of Indians in terms of businesses, educational institutions, and media. Due to the widespread use of English in India, the country is home to many international companies where English is commonly used for work. As English fluency often means higher socio­economic status in India, middle- and upper-class Indians who have greater access to English have relative ease when working, studying, traveling, and immigrating to areas of the world where English is a lingua franca, or common language.

English is used in many office settings, especially in the international businesses and multina­tional corporations housed in India. Businesses in Indian cities hire employees from all over the country, and English is a common language among people with different mother tongues. In shops and supermarkets, many labels are written in English in the Roman script.

Other than English in business and commerce, many people also use Modern Standard Hindi as a common language, especially in the northern regions of India. In many of these places, mixing two or more languages or language varieties together when speaking is a prevalent practice known as “code-switching.”

Example of code-switching in conversation:

Waiter: Aur chahiye ? (Do you want anything else?) [Hindi] Man: Don coffee pahije (We want two coffees) [Marathi]

Code-switching as a practice is distinct from commonly used English words that have been sub­sumed into other Indian languages, which are called “loan” or “borrowed” words.9 While English and forms of code-switching are incorporated into Indian corporate culture, many people find them­selves facing barriers to communication in these settings if they are not fluent in English or Hindi.

Example of loan words:

Teacher to the class: OK, all of you, open like this. Saglyana asa ghya aani, first page ogu-da, first page war kay lihile ? (Everyone take it like this and open to the first page. On the first page, what is written?) [English and Marathi]

The merits of multilingual education have dominated the field of education policy since the colonial period in India. Education in India is delivered in many different languages, but two lan­guages are the most popular: English and Hindi. Additionally, many schools have instruction in students’ mother tongues or the regional state language as well. A plan for trilingual learning, called the three-language formula (TLF), was adopted into education policy by the Ministry of Education in 1968 and has been in discussion in parliament since 1948, just after Independence. The three-lan­guage formula requires schoolchildren to “(a) study and to receive content area instruction for twelve years in their mother tongue or the regional (state) language (which for some children will be one and the same); (b) study Hindi or English for ten to twelve years; and (c) study a modern Indian lan­guage (i.e., any one of the “scheduled” languages) or a foreign language for three to five years.” How­ever, implementation of the TLF varies widely across the country today, with many English-language schools teaching limited English or only using English books and classroom materials. The idealized linguistic model presented in the 1968 TLF policy is meant to prepare students to be trilingual should students choose to enter the predominantly English-language higher education system and/or a glo­balized workforce. Proponents of multilingual education in India call attention to the importance of the three-language formula in adequately preparing primary and secondary school students for the linguistic demands of higher education, while also maintaining the rich linguistic heritage of India.

Even outside of education and business, Indians encounter English and multiple other Indian re­gional languages in media every day. They are especially likely to speak or read English in their daily lives if they are among the middle and upper socioeconomic classes, as increased English fluency aligns closely with socioeconomic class. There are many print media publications such as newspapers and magazines in English. Each city has at least one local English-language publication, and major print and online national publications can be found in Hindi and English. Each state’s news media publications are most commonly consumed in regional languages.

Visual media as well caters to regional language-speaking audiences, where local news broad­casts will be in the regional language and national news segments or specific programs will take place in Hindi. It is also becoming increasingly common for English to be used as part of code-switching practices in visual media, though English-only Indian broadcasts may be available at certain times or through special subscriptions or satellite television programming. In India, many regions have local film industries as well, where movies and television shows are produced in regional languages. Bollywood, the largest film industry in India, is located in Mumbai in the state of Maharashtra and produces films in Hindi. Bollywood movies are popular all over the world and can be viewed with subtitles for non-Hindi-speaking audiences. Interestingly, as of yet, no mainstream visual entertain­ment media industry in India makes English-only film or television productions, unlike in news and online digital media. It cannot be emphasized enough that as access and proliferation of English varies substantially along socioeconomic class lines, access to English in business, education, and media is linked to international capital and has a great capacity to increases one’s economic and social position.

As a multilingual country, India’s diversity has proven to be both a strength and a challenge to uni­fying the nation. Hopefully, this essay illustrates how multiple languages have shaped policies from education to the political boundaries of states, and, stemming from a colonial footprint and global pressures for greater use of English in international networks, the high demand for the use of English in India.

One can see there is a careful balance to multilingualism in India. English and languages like Hindi are deemed necessary for interaction in national and international communities beyond state and national borders, while mother tongues or regional languages are also made relevant through lo­cal state governments, institutions, and cultural identity. In this way, the cultivation and practices of multilingualism in India lends itself to more than just a preservation of unique, regional identities but has great impact on how Indians interact with fellow Indians and much of the world. Multilingual­ism in India defines the nation within global and national networks and communities for business, education, and media. As language plays an important part in our daily interactions, multilingualism and linguistic diversity in India have shaped the country and unique cultural practices and policies within it.

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• “2011 Census Data,” Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, https://tinyurl.com/y66egqfl .
• See the Eighth Schedule of The Constitution of India, 1949
• Ethnologue, Languages of the World . Web archive (1992) at the Library of Congress at https://tinyurl.com/y6s2yjd3 .
• Christopher Rolland King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in the Nineteenth Century North India (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1994).
• Lisa Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
• M. K. Gandhi 1917 as cited in Speeches and Writings of M. K. Gandhi 1922, https://tinyurl.com/ybxaft9e , 307.
• Articles 210 and 243 of The Constitution of India, 1949
• Official Languages Act, 1963, section 3
• Harold F. Schiffman and Michael C. Shapiro, Language and Society in South Asia (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1981).
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Hindi Day: The many, varying ideas of India’s ‘national’ language

Even supporters of hindi lacked consensus about the idea of the language and the role it was to play as the ‘national’ language..

In 1934, pioneering Hindi novelist Munshi Premchand wrote in his essay “Hindi, Urdu aur Hindustani” that the sentiment of nationalism has relatively recent origins – that it is approximately 200 years old. It emerged in India with colonial rule. As the British empire expanded in the subcontinent, so did the need for a feeling of nationalism among the people.

Lacking a nation-state, the need for a common national language became important. According to Premchand, this common language existed in three forms: Hindi, Urdu and Hindustani.

In the first half of the 20th century, there was a broad consensus among the leaders of the freedom movement that a common language was important for a united nation. But there were also deep disagreements about the nature of the national language and the aspirations associated with it.

These disagreements raised concerns about the lack of an inclusive nationalism, that a national language would propagate a homogeneous cultural identity, burden minorities with having to cede to majoritarian demands and lead to the domination of elite interests.

Even among the supporters of Hindi, there was a lack of consensus about the idea of the language itself and the specific role it was to play as the national language of the Indian nation.

These differences can be found in the work of three influential figures: independent India’s first president Rajendra Prasad, freedom fighter Purushottam Das Tandon and politician Ram Manohar Lohia.

Juxtaposing their varying ideas makes apparent the disagreements about the values and ideas of the nation that underlay their support for the same language – Hindi.

Rajendra Prasad was the founding member of the Rashtra Bhasha Prachar Samiti and president of the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha from 1948 to 1965. The sabha had been founded by Mohandas Gandhi in 1918. Both these organisations were aimed at popularising the use of Hindi across India, especially in non-Hindi speaking regions.

Speaking at a convocation organised by the University of Delhi in 1950, Prasad said that it was important to mingle and merge “the European and Arab currents” in the traditional current of our land to “establish complete harmony among the historic traditions of our country”.

Prasad did not hesitate to acknowledge the value of diverse inheritances of Hindi. In another speech, he asserted that Hindi has borrowed not just from Sanskrit but from Arabic, Persian, Portuguese, English, Latin, French, Spanish, and Dutch languages.

For him, it was of utmost necessity that this dynamic nature of the Hindi language – at once proud of its history and inheritance and open to new experiences – be exhibited in its function as the national language. It was this inclusive idea of Hindi that formed the basis of his support for it as the national language.

It also foregrounded Prasad’s imagination of the nation where “every group based on language or religion should, while trying to maintain its peculiar identity, also be ready to operate and mingle with other groups of this world”.

Prasad’s inclusive imagination is in contrast with the homogenising spirit in the nature of Hindi put forward by Purushottam Das Tandon. He was instrumental in the founding of the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, which held many conventions and meetings to gather support for Hindi as the national language.

For Tandon, there was a seamlessness between the national language and the mother tongue, which forms a continuous bond between the history of the Indian nation and its present. It is Hindi, which inherits the heritage of Sanskrit and written in the Nagari script, that is capable of representing India’s cultural uniformity and civilisational continuity, inspiring “nationalism among each and every citizen of the country”, he maintained.

In 1959, Tandon rejected the use of Roman numerals and the idea of diversifying the sources of enriching Hindi language. This hegemonic, majoritarian idea reflected an exclusionary imagination of the nation where “the minority had an equal role to play in maintaining the balance in the country” by agreeing to the demands of the majority – camouflaged as the cause of the nation. So Tamil and Telugu speakers were urged to learn Hindi and Indians who wrote in Arabic script were to switch to Nagari.

In addition to these two oppositional ideas about Hindi and of the nation, there was a third argument in support for Hindi that reflects different aspirations. Ram Manohar Lohia, whose politics were inspired by Gandhian and socialist ideals of emancipation, contended that in India it was not just caste and class but language that perpetuated a discriminatory hierarchy of its own.

It was the elite hegemony of the English language that treated the speakers of vernacular languages as inferior and incapable of possessing political and cultural power. Lohia was a polyglot and he understood the way the dominance of English carved out spaces of exclusion in democratic spaces for non-English speakers, especially those who belonged to lower castes and classes.

For Lohia, Hindi language, dissociated from its Sanskritised version, was capable of dethroning English from power. He advocated the spread of vernacular Hindi for use in politics, industry, science and technology. Such support for Hindi relied on its capacity to represent the voice of the masses in a democracy, particularly the marginalised sections. He supported multiple options such as Hindi as the national language, a multilingual central government with a robust system for translations or a Centre bifurcated into Hindi and English departments.

Each of these positions represent only some of the diversity of views among the supporters of Hindi. None of these ideas is free from criticisms of its own. Further, none were able to achieve a complete fruition in terms of their nationalist goals.

The debate around the national language continues to be significant because of the power of language to define the identity of the nation. But it is essential to question the need for a common language if it fails to address the anxieties of people across India.

Prachi Gupta is Assistant Professor at School of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts, IILM University.

September 14 is observed as Hindi Day.

• Hindi Language
• Nationalism
• Indian Nationalism
• Ram Manohar Lohia

Vol. 11 (2022) Empirical Approaches to Law and Language Studies

Research Articles

The Debate on 'One Nation, One Language'

https://doi.org/10.14762/jll.2022.001

Published 01.02.2022

• Garima Gupta

Affiliation

The debate on ‘one nation, one language’ stems from the idea that India is a nation-state, however, a reality check illustrates the fact that due to the existing political scenario of the world at large, India, although it may be branded as a nation-state as of today, did not start as one, neither during the pre-independence era nor in the post-independence era. The re-cent issues are cropping in and around the language debate in the country, wherein Hindi is ‘being promoted’, basically being a euphemistic expression of ‘being forced’. Imposition of a particular language on the entire geographical stretch of India would result in a new form of imperialism. Meaning thereby, promoting Hindi in the name of national integration and naming it as an ‘official language’ is the first step towards declaring it to be the ‘national lan-guage’. Since India inhabits people of varied linguistic backgrounds having separate dialects and scripts, such action on the part of the government is nothing less than being arbitrary.

Cite as : Gupta , JLL 11 (2022), 1-17, DOI: 10.14762/jll.2022.001 .

one language , one nation , official language , national language , imperialism , multilingualism

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Essay on indian languages.

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India is the home of a very large number of languages. In fact, so many languages and dialects are spoken in India that it is often described as a ‘museum of languages’. The language diversity is by all means baffling. In popular parlance it is often described as ‘linguistic pluralism’. But this may not be a correct description. The prevailing situation in the country is not pluralistic but that of a continuum. One dialect merges into the other almost imperceptibly; one language replaces the other gradually. Moreover, along the line of contact between two languages, there is a zone of transition in which people are bilingual.

Thus lan­guages do not exist in water-tight compartments. While linguistic pluralism is a state of mutual existence of several languages in a con­tiguous space, it does not preclude the possibility of inter-connections between one language and the other. In fact, these links have grown over millennia of shared history. While linguistic pluralism continues to be a distinctive feature of the modern Indian state, it will be wrong to assume that there has been no interaction between the different groups.

On the contrary, the give-and-take between the languages groups has been very common, often resulting in systematic borrow­ings from one language to the other. The cases of assimilation of one language into the other are also not uncommon. Let us look at the nature of linguistic diversity observed in India today. According to the Linguistic Survey of India conducted by Sir George Abraham Grierson towards the end of the nineteenth century, there were 179 languages and as many as 544 dialects in the country.

However, this number has to be taken with caution. It may even be misleading in the sense that dialects and languages were enumerated separately, although they were taxonomically part of the same lan­guage. Of the 179 languages as many as 116 were speech-forms of the Sino-Tibetan family, spoken by small tribal communities in the re­mote Himalayan and the northeastern parts of the country.

Even the 1961 census recorded 187 languages. This was despite the fact that the census investigation was far more systematic and the classification was based on modern linguistic criteria. Much of this diversity may be un­derstood properly in the light of some more statistics. For example, 94 out of the 187 languages were spoken by small populations of 10,000 persons or less. In the final analysis, about 97 per cent of the country’s population was found affiliated with just 23 languages.

The diversity of languages and dialects is a reality and it is not the numerical strength of the speakers of a language which is important. The important fact is that there are people who claim a certain lan­guage as their mother tongue. Another related development which contributed to linguistic di­versity was the development of script. Different Indian languages were written in different scripts. This made learning of different languages a difficult exercise. However, with the growth of scripts, written lan­guages have been successful in maintaining their record with the consequence that literary traditions have evolved.

With the develop­ment of a script, oral communication is supplemented by a more powerful form of written communication. In the course of time some of the minor dialect and language groups have lost their identity as they have been assimilated into developed languages. It is a known fact that most of the languages still serve the purpose of oral communica­tion only as speakers of these languages are still illiterate, or preliterate.

It may be assumed that in the beginning various speech communi­ties were confined to their own enclaves, more or less unaware of the existence of other language/dialect groups in the neighbourhood. Sometimes, the boundary between two dialects, or two languages, was knife-edged, as it was described by a hill-line or a river. Within the en­claves, these groups have been communicating through a common language, or dialect, for centuries.

This became the basis of their iden­tity. This traditional association with a language gave them a sense of belonging and thus inculcated in them a feeling of unity with the larger speech community. It may, however, be noted that inter-com­munication through a language or dialect is always limited in space. Individuals in their daily course of life have a limited reach. In situ­ations where the communication is largely oral the sphere of communication is even smaller. Thus, with the passage of time, each speech community gets differentiated from other communities in the neighbourhood.

This process leads to splitting of the spoken language into diverse dialects. The dialect formation is, however, within the same speech area. With the expansion of the speech territory more dialect groups emerge and the distance between them increases. Some­times the outlying dialects are so isolated from the parent language that they acquire linguistic nuances of their own sufficient enough to be recognized as an independent branch. A study of historical linguis­tics reveals that India has gone through all these phases of language development. The present linguistic map of India is naturally a prod­uct of these developments.

Language and Dialect:

The faculty of speech is by far the most distinctive human trait. Hu­man beings use a system of language for communication which distinguishes them from the rest of the animal kingdom. It was through language that communication between the different members of a human group started in the early stages of social evolution.

Lan­guage thus facilitated multiple forms of human cooperation. Eventually, a division of labour emerged, a prototype of which is un­imaginable in the animal world. However, there is no gainsaying the fact that animals also communicate with one another. They also pro­duce vocal sounds although their sounds are simple.

One can differentiate between warning calls, mating calls and those expressing anger or affection. This system of communication is simple as it lacks structure. A structured language was the invention of the human mind, and the most effective tool of communication. In this language words could be replaced easily to change the content of meaning.

In its basic characteristics a human language is essentially a signaling system in which a variety of vocal sounds are employed. These vocal sounds are produced by the peculiar constitution of the human speech organs. There is a combination of the different speech organs— the tongue, glottis, vocal cords and the palate—in producing vocal sounds which are essential elements in human articulation of language.

It appears that in the beginning speakers of a language restricted their communication to relatively small number of vocal sounds out of the many sounds which human beings were capable of making. However, the number of vocal sounds varied from language to language which indicated variations in social evolution and the material conditions of existence. Most languages are satisfied with the use of twenty or thirty such sounds. But there are other languages which have as many as sixty sounds, or even more.

There are others which have less than twenty sounds. These sounds constitute the system of a language. As we know the purpose of a language is communication and a language sooner or later tends to become symbolic, more complex and expressive of abstract ideas. The beginnings of all languages were, however, simple.

There are very specific purposes for which the language is used. The main purpose is, of course, to express oneself, to convey one’s feelings, sometimes to express a desire or pray for help. The human beings also communicate their ideas through body language either alone or in combination with vocal sounds or words.

Even today, the body language continues to be a powerful means of expression. The exchange of ideas, feelings and calls for pray or help continue in the daily course of life of a human being. Thus, an intricate pattern of hu­man cooperation and a feeling of togetherness is evolved. It is obvious that a language needs a group of people among whom communication continues through this language.

This group of people who communi­cate in a certain language may be described as the ‘speech community’. In the course of time, several speech communities are formed, each oc­cupying a chunk of a geographically contiguous space (Fig. 6.1).

Each language eventually expands over a territory, homogeneous in terms of its language structure—vocal sounds, words, sentences and conventionalized symbols. When a language is written in a script it lends to stabilize its distinguishing features and promotes communica­tion over long distances between people.

Origins of Language:

Origins of language are shrouded in mystery. However, it is possible to reconstruct the bits of this history. It is generally agreed that in the history of social evolution language must have arisen with the discov­ery of the art of tool-making. Understandably, the early tool-making communities must have depended on cooperation between different members of the group on a highly organized basis.

This would have been possible through the use of a language. Thus evolution of lan­guage must have progressed hand in hand with the evolution of material cultures. As the history of material cultures shows the change in techniques of tool-making was initially slow, but later on it picked up. Language also evolved with the same pace. Expressions became more and more complex with the passage of time. In fact, at every stage of evolution, there was a direct relationship between material culture and the language in use.

Evidently progress in material cul­tures shows that the functions of brain were becoming more and more complex and with these changes language also became complex. The way languages evolved from vocal sounds to words and sentences re­vealed how they became symbolic as humans tended to express abstract rather than concrete ideas.

It is obvious that in the course of evolution many languages were invented independently at different points of time in different regions of the world. They became further ramified as the social space within which inter-communication continued was always limited (Box 6.1). As a result, new groups were formed and new speech communities came into being.

This is how the ‘families of languages’ developed. It is also understandable that the early languages were oral and writing became possible much later. In the beginning there was no need for maintaining a written record. When such a need arose writing was in­itially mostly pictorial.

The discovery of the script in the history of development of languages must have taken a painstakingly long time during which picture/signs became conventionalized. Our knowledge of the early scripts is still incomplete. For example, the script of the Indus valley (Harappan) civilization continues to pose difficulties. We have not been able to decipher it simply because we are not familiar with the system of language in which communication was conducted by the Harappan people.

India as a Linguistic Area:

Despite the widely perceived linguistic diversity India’s unity as a socio-linguistic area is quite impressive. Several linguists have analyzed the basic elements of India as a socio-linguistic area. Describing lan­guage as an ‘autonomous system’, Lachman M. Khubchandani recognized the major characteristics of the speech forms of modem In­dia. Each region of the country is characterized by the plurality of cultures and languages “with a unique mosaic of verbal experience”. In Khubchandani’s view modem languages of India represent a striking example of the process of diffusion, grammatical as well as phonetic, over many contiguous areas.

However, he considers linguistic plural­ity only as a superficial trait. “Indian masses through sustained interaction and common legacies have developed a common way to interpret, to share experiences, to think.” What has emerged is a kind of organic plurality, although the geographical distribution of speech communities suggests a kind of linguistic heterogeneity.

Some of the basic elements of India’s linguistic unity may be seen in the fuzzy na­ture of language boundaries, fluidity in language identity and complementarity of inter-group and intra-group communication. Khubchandani also emphasized the need of linking languages with the ecology of cultural regions described by him as kshetras.

As a language area India is being put to mutually contradictory linguistic interpreta­tions which confuse the issue. Perhaps a better understanding of the linguistic scene can be developed if the static account of the multiplic­ity of languages is replaced by recognition of the elements of cultural regionalism. Similarly, the issue of linguistic homogeneity which has been argued by several linguists is fraught with complexities. In this context, one can cite the example of the states of the Indian Union carved out on the principle of linguistic homogeneity. The reality is that these states are not necessarily homogeneous in their language composition and cultural attributes.

In an earlier study, Khubchandani examined the evidence on plu­ral languages and plural cultures of India. He dwelt upon the question of language in a plural society. The processes of language modern­ization and language promotion were also analyzed on the basis of a review of the language policies and planning in India. In this work, Khubchandani noted that people in certain regions of India displayed a certain degree of fluidity in their declaration of mother tongue. On this basis, he recognized two zones in which the country could be di­vided: a fluid zone and a stable zone. The fluid zone extended over the north-central region where Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Kashmiri and Dogri are spoken.

The stable zone, on the other hand, incorporates western, southern and eastern regions. People in these regions did not reveal any fluidity in their mother tongue declaration. Reference may also be made to the seminal work of Murray B. Emeneau who analyzed the characteristics of India as a language area. Tracing the history of development of the Indo-Aryan and the Dravidian languages he evaluated the shared experiences of the differ­ent speech communities.

Emeneau defined linguistic area as “an area which includes languages belonging to more than one family but shar­ing traits in common which are found not to belong to other members of (at least) one of the families”.

Geographic Patterning of Languages:

The geographic patterning of languages in the South Asian sub-conti­nent can perhaps be understood in the context of the space relations the region had with other parts of Asia. As already pointed out, the sub-continent marks a southward projection of the Asian landmass into the Indian Ocean. The overland connections with West and Cen­tral Asia, Tibet, China and other regions of Southeast Asia helped the process of infiltration of linguistic influences into the South Asian re­gion.

This is evident from the fact that the languages spoken in the peripheral regions of South Asia, such as Baluchistan, Pak-Afghan bor­derlands, Kashmir, Gilgit, Hunza, Baltistan and Ladakh as well as the hilly parts of Himachal Pradesh and the regions in the Northeast have strong affinity with the languages spoken in the regions beyond the Hindu-Kush Himalayas. The remote Himalayan areas became the abode of Tibeto-Chinese languages. Similarly, the Northeastern re­gion continued to receive influences from the neighbouring parts of Myanmar, Thailand and Indo-China. These regions are now the do­main of the Tibeto-Chinese (Sino-Tibetan) or Tibeto-Burman languages.

The people in the plains of North India from Sind to As­sam acquired different branches of the Indo-European family of languages. The peninsular region continued to retain the Dravidian speech-forms even though the north was completely swayed over by the Indo-European languages. Between the Indo-European and the Dravidian one finds the Austric-speaking tribes nestled in the hills of the mid-Indian region.

The linguistic heterogeneity of India can perhaps be brought to some order when one realizes that these speeches really belong to four language families: Sino-Tibetan (Tibeto-Burman), Austro-Asiatic, Dravidian and Indo-European. In the course of usage over millennia of years these language families have found for themselves niches in the Indian social space in different parts of the sub-continent.

Their geo­graphical patterning throws some light on the routes through which these language families reached India. In fact, despite the vast heteroge­neity, Indian languages experienced parallel trends in linguistic and literary development during the long phases of shared history. This has made India ‘a composite region’ in terms of linguistic attributes (Table 6.1).

Historical Process of Language Diffusion:

The history of Indian languages is not easy to reconstruct. As an over­view of the processes of peopling of India shows, Negroids were the first people to arrive. However, we do not exactly know about their language affiliation. The subsequent waves of migrations were so strong that the Negroids lost their identity completely, leaving behind little traces of either their racial or linguistic past.

The story of the four families of languages may be briefly reca­pitulated here, although it is not easy to establish the chronological sequence in which the speakers of the Austric, Sino-Tibetan and the Dravidian languages came to India. It is almost certain that these fami­lies were already there at the time of the advent of the Indo-Aryan.

This is, however, an established fact that the Sino-Tibetan speech com­munities were Mongoloids racially. The original Sino-Tibetan, the parent of the early Chinese, is supposed to have developed somewhere in western China around 400 B.C. It is also believed that the diffusion of this language eventually affected the regions lying to the south and the southwest of China-Tibet, Ladakh, northeastern India, Myanmar and Thailand. Perhaps, the Vedic Aryans were familiar with this group. They described the Tibeto-Burman-speaking Mongoloids of the Brahmaputra valley and the adjoining regions as Kiratas.

The speakers of the Kirata family of languages are distributed all along the Himalayan axis from Baltistan and Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh. They occupy the regions surrounding the Brahmaputra val­ley in the northeast from Nagaland to Tripura and Meghalaya. There are striking differences between the languages of the Kirata family dis­tributed over such a vast geographical area. The speakers of the Tibeto-Himalayan branch of the Kirata languages occupy the Himala­yan regions from Baltistan to Sikkim and beyond to Arunachal Pradesh.

The Bhotia group consists of the Balti, Ladakhi, Lahauli, Sherpa and the Sikkim Bhotia dialects. Linguists also recognize a Hi­malayan group consisting of Lahuli of Chamba, Kanauri and Lepcha which is distinguishable on the basis of certain linguistic traits. In the east there is a North-Assam branch including the dialects of Arunachal Pradesh, such as Miri and Mishing. In other parts of the northeast the languages belong to the Assam-Burmese branch and are divided into Bodo, Naga, Kachin and Kuki-Chin groups. The speakers of the Kirata languages came to India in different streams at different points of time. Understandably, the groups in the northwest were unrelated to the groups in the northeast.

Similarly, the Kachin and the Kuki-Chin groups followed separate routes of migration. This is why there is a vast variety of dialects within the Kirata family and the roots of lin­guistic heterogeneity go far beyond the Indian borders into the neighbouring parts of Tibet, Myanmar and Indo-China. Anthropologists as well as linguists believe that the Austric-speaking groups came earlier than the Dravidian-speaking communities. The Austric speech communities were already there in the mid-Indian region before the advent of the Dravidian. The present geography of the Austric dialect groups holds some clues to the historical processes of their diffusion into India.

Generally, the Austric family of lan­guages is recognized as consisting of a Mon-Khmer and a Munda branch. The Mon-Khmer speakers belong to two separate groups, viz., Khasi and the Nicobarese, both separated by a distance of more than 1,500 kilometres which spans over an expanse of the Bay of Bengal. There is no clarity among the scholars about the routes taken by the speakers of the Mon-Khmer dialects. The Khasi speakers themselves are surrounded by other Kirata and Arya dialects in the Meghalayan plateau.

The advent of the Dravidian in India is generally associated with a branch of the Mediterranean racial stock which was already there in India before the rise of the Indus valley civilization. In fact, archaeolo­gists believe that they were the builders of the Harappan civilization along with the Proto-Austroloids. The Dravidian speech communities were found over most of the northern and the northwestern region of India before the advent of the Indo-Aryan. However, following the rise of the Indo-Aryan in northwestern India, a linguistic change came and the Dravidian-speak- ing area shrank in its geographical extent.

The present distributions of the Dravidian dialects in different parts of North India, such as Baluchistan, Chhotanagpur plateau and eastern Madhya Pradesh, where Baruhi, Kurukh-Oraon and the Gondi are spoken respectively, suggest the earlier stage of distribution of this family of languages. In fact, Gondi is spoken in many parts of Central India from Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra to Orissa and Andhra Pradesh.

While Dravidian speech forms were in use for many centuries in the pre- Christian era, the literary development in the Dravidian speech community could take place only in the first few centuries after Christ. It is believed that the old Tamil, old Kannada and the old Telugu had already come into being by 1000 A.D. Malayalam ac­quired its form a little later. With the Vedic Sanskrit, a branch of the Indo-European, the Indo- Aryan established itself in northwestern India. It had definite relations with the different Indo-European languages, such as Persian, Arme­nian, Greek, French, Spanish, German and English. An early form of Indo-European seems to have genetic relations with the Hittite speech of Asia Minor.

The linguists have recognized a primitive form of Indo- European in its earlier stage of development. They called it Indo-Hittite. A branch of the Indo-European which had already estab­lished itself in Mesopotamia came to be described by the linguists as Indo-Iranian. It is this Indo-Iranian branch which spread over Iran and the northwestern regions of India by the middle of the second millen­nium B.C. Among the different families of languages spoken in India the Indo-European seems to be the last to arrive. The advent of Indo- European in the South Asian sub-continent brought about a major change in the linguistic affinity of the people of northern India.

The form of Indo-European which was spoken in India came to be known as Indo-Iranian or Indo-Aryan. Its advent in India is seen with the rise of the Vedic Sanskrit. However, the old Sanskrit changed into Prakrit and several speech forms developed in different parts of northern and western India. The region lying between Saraswati and Ganga, encom­passing the upper Ganga-Yamuna doab and adjoining parts of Haryana, to the west of the Yamuna, became the stage for the trans­formation of classical Sanskrit into a Prakrit form. From this early stage of development of Prakrit came the different Indo-Aryan ver­naculars which are now spoken in north-western, north-central, central and eastern parts of India.

The Suraseni emerged in the core re­gion of the midland (Madhyadesa of the Purartas) as the popular language. Its core area extended over western Uttar Pradesh and the adjoining parts of Haryana. A developed form of this parent language is described by the linguists as Western Hindi (Fig. 6.2).

Around the core region of Suraseni other speech forms developed on the west, south and east. These languages formed an outer band around the core language. On the west and the northwest lay the Punjabi and the Pahari dialects. Rajasthani and Gujarati emerged on the southwest. On the east, a form of language, now known as Eastern Hindi, emerged in Kosali (Awadhi). Linguists believe that these outer dialects were all more closely related to each other than any one of them was to the language of the midland.

“In fact, at an early period of the linguistic history of India, there must have been two sets of Indo-Aryan dialects—one the language of the midland and the other the group of dialects forming the outer band.” This first stage was followed by a subsequent phase of expansion. As the population of the midland region increased expansion became a necessity. Thus, on the periphery of the languages of the outer band developed new speech forms which were by and large not related to the language of the midland.

For example, while Punjabi was closely related to the language of the upper doab it got transformed into Lahnda in southwestern Punjab. This language had little relationship with the language of the midland. With increasing distance changes be­came quite pronounced. The geographical distribution of the Indo-Aryan languages may be briefly summarized here as follows: The midland language occupies the Ganga-Yamuna doab and the regions to its north and south. This core region is encircled by different speech forms in eastern Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat.

Further beyond in the west and the northwest, there is a band of outer languages—Kashmiri, Sindhi, Lahnda and Kohistani. The languages of this band may be described as constituting the northwestern group of the outer languages. On the southern pe­riphery lies the Marathi. In the intermediate band are situated languages, such as Awadhi, Bagheli and Chhattisgarhi. On the eastern periphery lie the three dialects of Bihari, viz., Bhojpuri, Maithili and Maghadi. The Bihari is surrounded by Oriya in the southeast and Ben­gali in the east. The languages of the eastern branch of the Indo-Aryan extend further in the east where Assamese occupies the Brahmaputra valley (Fig. 6.3).

Linguists believe that the development of the Indo-Aryan lan­guages completed itself through several phases. The Prakrits developed into two stages: Primary Prakrits and Secondary Prakrits. The Primary Prakrits which were the first to evolve out of the classical Sanskrit were synthetic languages with a complicated grammar.

In the course of time they ‘decayed’ into Secondary Prakrits. “Here we find the languages still synthetic, but diphthongs and harsh combinations are eschewed, till in the latest developments we find a condition of almost absolute fluidity, each language becoming an emasculated collection of vowels hanging for support on an occasional consonant. This weakness brought its own nemesis and from, say 1000 A.D., we find in existence the series of modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars, or, as they may be called Tertiary Prakrits.”

The last stage of development of the Prakrits is known as literary Apabrahmsa. It is supposed that the modern vernaculars are the direct children of these Apabrahmsas. The sequence of change was like this. The Suraseni Apabrahmsa was the parent of Western Hindi and Pun­jabi. Closely connected with it were Avanti, the parent of Rajasthani, and Gaurjari the parent of Gujarati. The other intermediate language —Kosali (Eastern Hindi)—sprang from Ardha-Magadhi Apabrahmsa. The chronological sequence may be roughly reconstructed here (Table 6.2).

The different stages through which the Indo-Aryan languages passed can be depicted as on Figure 6.4.

In a country where so many languages/dialects are spoken, and many of them are used for oral communication only, linguistic classification may not be an easy exercise. The scientific study of Indian languages, their grammar, phonetics and vocabulary which goes back to the nine­teenth century is still ridden with problems.

For one thing, linguists are still unsure of genetic relationships between one language group and the other. Their knowledge of some of the minor languages is pa­thetically inadequate. This leaves the problem of classification always open to revision. A second set of problems arises from the recognition of the major languages and their specification in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution.

There were political compulsions under which some languages were given this special status. The Eighth Schedule mentions eighteen languages; twelve of them have their own territory where they receive maximum state patronage and seem to have great potential for development. The Eighth Schedule also in­cludes languages, such as Sanskrit, Sindhi, Nepali and Urdu. The first three do not have a speech territory as such. The speakers of Urdu, Sindhi and Nepali are distributed across several states.

Minor speech communities, such as Manipuri (with a population of 1.27 million) and Konkani (with a population of 1.72 million) have also been given the status of scheduled languages. The anomaly in this approach is that while some of the minority speech groups have found a place in the Eighth Schedule, major Austric languages, such as Santali (speakers 5.22 million), Bhili (speakers 5.57 million) or Gondi (speakers 2.12 million), have been completely ignored.

The official language policy leaves the issue amenable to political manipulation. Like the Austric languages all small Tibeto-Burman languages have also been excluded from the Eighth Schedule. Hindi, which has the largest number of speakers, is an aggregate of at least fifty different dialect groups. There are at least seven states which recognize Hindi as their official lan­guage. Of the four language families (Tibeto-Burman, Austro-Asiatic, Dravidian and the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European) the most diverse is the Tibeto-Burman as their speakers communicate in 70-80 different languages. Next is the Indo-Aryan with 19 languages grouped under it.

The Dravidian family incorporates 17 different speech com­munities; while the Austro-Asiatic has 14 languages. However, this analysis is incomplete because of the fact that the 1991 census used an eligibility condition for recognizing a language as a mother tongue if it had more than 10,000 speakers at the all-India level.

This resulted in the exclusion of 0.56 million speakers of different minor languages from finding a reference in the census records. There is, therefore, no recognition of these small speech communities. Due to operational difficulties, the 1991 census could not be conducted in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. This resulted in the exclusion of the Dard group of languages (Dardi, Shina, Kohistani and Kashmiri) from the census count.

The compilation of data for the 18 scheduled languages also contributed to the multiple problems of classification. For example, minor speech communities, such as Chakma and Hajong, were clubbed together with Bengali. Secondly, Yerava and Yerukala were amalgamated with Malayalam and Tamil respectively. Such examples are many. It is obvious that the census preferred to ignore the minor dialect groups.

The story of Hindi is equally interesting. For example, 50 dialect groups have been grouped under Hindi with the result that there is no scope for an analytical study of the geographical spread of these dialect groups. In the course of time many speakers of these dialects have tended to declare Hindi as their mother tongue without making refer­ence to the dialect they use.

This is evident from the fact that some 233 million speakers declared Hindi as their mother tongue. Gradu­ally, the stage is not far when many of the distinguished dialect groups, such as Braj Bhasha, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Magadhi, Maithili and Marwari, will loose their identity at least in the census records. This withdrawal of patronage by the speakers of these dialects is a symp­tom of their eventual decline, if not death. A broad classification scheme of the four language families is given in Table 6.1 (for detailed classificatory schemes, see Tables 6.3-6.6).

Numerical Strength:

Of the four language families Indo-European has by far the largest strength of speakers. In fact, three-fourths of the country’s population claimed one or the other language of the Indo-European family as their mother tongue. The Dravidian family comes next with 22.5 per cent of the total population of the country claiming affinity to it.

The speakers of the other two families—Austro-Asiatic and the Tibeto- Burman—consist of small groups. Their overall proportionate share is low: 1.13 and 0.97 per cent respectively. As already indicated, Austro- Asiatic languages are spoken by a host of tribal groups. This is also true for most of the Tibeto-Burman languages.

Among the languages of the Austro-Asiatic family, Santali is the most outstanding speech community, the numerical strength of its speakers being as high as 5.2 million. Other languages of the Munda branch, such as Ho, or of the Mon Khmer branch, such as Khasi, have a numerical strength of less than one million speakers each. Santali speakers account for 55 per cent of the entire strength of the Austro- Asiatic family. Speakers of the Ho, Khasi and Mundari languages account for 10, 9.6 and 9.1 per cent respectively of all Austric speak­ers.

There are many language groups within the Austro-Asiatic family whose numerical strength is insignificant. Reference may be made to Bhumij, Nicobarese, Gadaba and Juang. However, their declining nu­merical strength shows that conditions are not favourable for their growth. As indicated earlier, the 1991 census adopted a policy of ex­cluding all languages from the census count whose speakers numbered less than 10,000 persons at the all-India level at the time of census enu­meration. This policy was by and large negative to the interests of the tribal languages.

As is evident from Tables 6.3-6.6, there are striking differences in the numerical strength of the languages of the Tibeto-Burman family. The major speech communities include Manipuri/Meithei (1.27 mil­lion), Bodo (1.22 million), Tripuri (0.69 million), Garo (0.67 million), Lushai (0.54 million) and Miri/Mishing (0.39 million). The Manipuri and Bodo groups together account for one-third of the total strength of Tibeto-Burman speakers.

As is generally known, the major Dravidian speech communities consist of Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. They have been ranked here in descending order of the strength of their speakers. The Dravidian family also includes minor groups, such as Gondi (2.12 mil­lion), Tulu (1.55 million), Kurukh-Oraon (1.42 million), Kui (0.64 million), Koya (0.27 million) and Khond (0.22 million).

Many of them are tribal dialects and have an imminent risk of extinction. Gondi, for example, presents a case of language loss, as its speakers are getting as­similated into the regional languages of the state of their habitation. The same is true for other tribal dialects, unless otherwise they have come under the cover of state protection.

In terms of numerical strength of speakers Hindi is the foremost among the Indo-European languages. With 337.27 million speakers who claimed Hindi, or its different dialects, as their mother tongue, Hindi has no comparison with other languages of the family.

Bengali, Marathi and Urdu which follow in the same order have a numerical strength ranging between 43 and 69 million. Bengali and Marathi ac­count for about 10 per cent each of the total strength of speakers of the Indo-European family. Among the dialects of Hindi, Bhojpuri was claimed by 23,1 million speakers. One can compare Bhojpuri with As­samese (total speakers: 12.96 million) and Punjabi (total speakers; 23.08 million).

The other dialects of Hindi, such as Maithili, Magadhi, Awadhi, Braj Bhasha, Marwari or Chhattisgarhi figure poorly. In fact, the dialect speakers tend to declare Hindi as their mother tongue. The strength of those who declared these dialects as their mother tongue seems to be diminishing with successive censuses. The progress of the languages of the Dard group, namely, Shina, Kohistani and Kashmiri, cannot be monitored since 1991 census was not conducted in Jammu and Kashmir.

As many as 13 of the Indo-European languages have been listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. They are: Kashmiri (Dard group), Sindhi (northwestern group), Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Nepali, Gujarati (eastern, east-central, central and northern groups), Bengali, Assamese and Oriya (eastern group) and Marathi and Konkani (southern group). While Konkani, with a total strength of 1.76 million speakers, is mentioned in the Eighth Schedule, Santali finds no place, although its speakers numbered at 5.22 million at the 1991 census.

Language Domains:

A generalized study of the domains of various languages spoken in In­dia may be helpful in understanding the historical processes leading to their geographic spread and concentration. It may also be helpful in identifying the basic elements of India’s linguistic geography. It may be worthwhile to recapitulate the historical processes that led to the evolution of language regions in India (Box 6.2).

It is understood that the Indo-Aryan was the last to arrive. It was preceded by Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan and Austric. However, there is no clarity about the chronological sequence in which the different families came to affect the situation in India. This question has been partly answered by the linguists. Which came first? Austro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan or Dravidian? The Vedic Aryans had the knowledge of the Tibeto-Bur- man-speaking Mongoloids whom they described as the Kiratas. Yajurveda and Atharvaveda as well as Mahabharata and Manu Samhita also mentioned the Kiratas.

Austro-Asiatic Languages:

The domain of the Austro-Asiatic languages lies in the mid-Indian re­gion and extends from Maharashtra to West Bengal. The two outliers of this domain—Khasi and Nicobarese—have their enclaves in Meghalaya and Nicobar Islands respectively. The two pockets are separated by a vast expanse of the sea. Santali is the foremost among the Munda languages. The Santali speakers are mainly concentrated in Bihar, West Bengal and Orissa. About one-half of them live in Bihar, 35 per cent in West Bengal and 13 per cent in Orissa. The Santals living in Assam, numbering 135,000, also declared Santali as their mother tongue at the 1991 census.

Another significant language of the Munda branch is Munda/Mundari. Of the 1.27 million speakers of Mundari, 54 per cent live in Bihar, 31 per cent in Orissa and only 6 per cent in West Bengal. The domain of the Ho language lies in Bihar and Orissa. Two-thirds of all Ho speakers are confined to Bihar and the remaining one-third to Orissa. The territories of the Kharia, Korku and Savara languages extend over Bihar, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh. However, the Savara speakers are mostly confined to Orissa.

Tibeto-Burman Language:

The territory of the Tibeto-Burman languages is by and large conter­minous with the Himalayas and extends from Baltistan and Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh. It extends further to en­compass other northeastern states. The Bhotia and the Himalayan groups of the Tibeto-Burman family are confined to Jammu and Kash­mir, Himachal Pradesh, hilly Uttar Pradesh and Sikkim. The Tibetan speakers, however, have a wider spread as they are distributed over many states in India. The Tibetans are of course in exile in India and live in camps and colonies especially created for them in several states. Notable among the languages of the North Assam branch of the Tibeto-Burman family are Miri/Mishing and Adi.

More than 97 per cent of the Adi speakers are confined to Arunachal Pradesh. The Miri/Mishing speakers, on the other hand, are confined to Assam. Of the languages of the Bodo group, Bodo is largely specific to Assam where 97 per cent of its speakers live. The domains of the Garo and Tripuri lie in Meghalaya and Tripura respectively.

About 80 per cent of the Garo speakers are confined to Meghalaya whereas 17 per cent of them are based in Assam. About 93 per cent of the Tripuri speakers are confined to Tripura, although in recent years a section of their population has also moved out to Mizoram and Assam. The Bodo group also includes Karabi/Mikir and Rabha dialects.

Their speakers are mostly concentrated in Assam and Meghalaya. However, a small proportion of Rabha speakers is also found in the northern districts of West Bengal. Likewise, the Koch is confined to Meghalaya and Assam, Dimasa to Assam and Nagaland, and Lalung is specific to Assam alone. Most of the speech territory of the Naga group of languages is shared between Nagaland and Manipur. While Ao, Angami, Lotha, Pochury, Phom, Yimchingure and Khiemnungan are exclusive to Na­galand, Kabui and Tangkhul are specific to Manipur. On the other hand, Khezha and Mao are spoken both in Manipur and Nagaland. However, a small proportion of their speakers are also located in As­sam.

The Kuki-Chin languages are confined to the states of Manipur and Mizoram. Manipuri (including Meitei) has its domain in the cen­tral valley of Manipur where 87 per cent of its speakers live. A section of the Manipuri population (about 10 per cent) has also moved out to Assam. Manipuri speakers were also enumerated in Tripura, Nagaland and other parts of the northeast, although in small numbers. Lushai is confined to Mizoram. Manipur presents a case of linguistic plurality. In fact, the state is the home of many speech communities belonging to both the Naga and Kuki-Chin groups.

Notable among these dia­lects are Thado, Paite, Halam, Hmar, Kabui, Tangkhul, Gangte, Khezha, Kom, Kuki, Liangmei, Lushai, Mao, Maram, Maring, Vaiphei, Zeliang, Zemi and Zau. Lakher has its domain in Mizoram only. Migration in recent years has taken the Kuki speakers to other parts of the northeast, such as Assam, Nagaland and Tripura. Manipur may be chosen as an example to illustrate the territorial­ity of minor language groups in a contiguous geographical space. The people of Manipur exhibit a complex pattern of ethnic diversity, where each ethnic or dialect group tends to concentrate in a mono­lithic world of its own.

Broadly speaking, the population of Manipur consists of two different groups:

(a) Palaeo-Mongoloids consisting of

(i) The Meiteis, and

(ii) The hill tribes; and

(b) Immigrants mostly con­sisting of Palae-Mediterraneans further sub-divided into

(i) The Pangals (Muslim settlers), and

(ii) The Mayangs or Kols. Each of these groups can be further sub-divided on the basis of language/dialect and racial attributes.

While the Meiteis, Pangals and Mayangs are plain-dwellers, the tribes, such as Kuki-Chins and Nagas are hill-dwellers. The ethno- lingual situation in Manipur suggests that geographical factors have promoted the emergence of homogeneous dialect territories. Each dia­lect is confined to a pocket where people communicate in a given dialect. These monolithic dialect territories are contiguous. This lin­guistic plurality has survived the onslaught of time.

In his doctoral thesis Hemkhothang Lunghdim examined the pat­terns of communication in the multi-speech area of Manipur. The presence of as many as 29 major speech communities in Manipur has contributed to a type of ethno-centrism for the survival of speeches or Patois coupled with other socio-cultural differences.

Ethnic groups have often indulged in competition resulting in inter-ethnic conflicts. In any case ethnic groups strive for the preservation of their dialects even if it results in diminishing interaction between different dialect groups. Over time linguistic plurality has resulted in bilingualism or multilingualism. Many tribes have adopted elements of Meitei-Lon for mutual inter-communication (Box 6.3).

Dravidian Languages :

As is generally known, the four southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala are the home of the major Dravidian languages, viz., Telugu, Kannada, Tamil and Malayalam. The speakers of these languages have also moved out to other states, particularly the neighbouring states of the south in the recent past. The geographical spread of these languages is evident from Table 6.7.

Evidently, these languages display a high degree of concentration in their home states. The highest degree of concentration is seen in the case of Malayalam, followed by Tamil. On the other hand, the lowest degree of concentration is revealed in the case of Telugu. There are several minor speech communities within the Dravidian family. Notable among them are: Yurukala, Yerava, Tulu, Coorgi, Gondi, Malto and Kurukh-Oraon. The Kurukh-Oraon and Malto are confined to Bihar. They belong to the northern branch of the Dravidian family.

Gondi, which is classified as a language of the central Dravidian branch, is the traditional dialect of the Gonds. However, recent census data show a steep decline in the numerical strength of the Gondi speakers. At the 1991 census, the Gondi-speaking population numbered just 2.12 million. This is an indication of the loss of language due to assimilation into the dominant regional lan­guages. More than 90 per cent of the Gondi (mother tongue) speakers live in Madhya Pradesh (70 per cent) and Maharashtra (21 per cent). The remaining population is found in Andhra Pradesh and Orissa. In other states, their number is too small.

Indo-European Languages:

Both in terms of numerical strength and the territorial extent the Indo-European languages surpass all other language families in India. The speech territory extends from Rajasthan in the west to Assam in the east and from Jammu and Kashmir in the north to Goa in the south. In fact, the domain of the Indo-European family extends be­yond the borders of Rajasthan on the west and continues over adjoining Pakistan. Notable among the languages of this family are Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Urdu, Gujarati, Oriya, Punjabi and As­samese. Keeping in view their importance as many as 13 of the Indo-European languages have been included in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution.

While Hindi and Urdu are spoken across many states, including southern states, other languages, such as Ben­gali, Marathi, Gujarati, Oriya, Punjabi and Assamese, are specific to their own states. For example, while Bengali is specific to West Ben­gal, Marathi and Gujarati have their domain in Maharashtra and Gujarat respectively. The dominance of Hindi is evident from the fact that there were 337 million speakers who claimed it as their mother tongue in the 1991 census. About 81 per cent of the total population of Bihar, 91 per cent of Haryana and 89 per cent of Himachal Pradesh claimed affinity to Hindi.

The respective percentages for Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh were 89 and 90. The story of the Hindi-speaking population is rather complicated. There are no less than 50 dialects which are grouped under Hindi. The speakers of these dialects de­clared them as their mother tongue in the same way as millions of others accepted Hindi as their mother tongue without making any ref­erence to the dialect used by them.

These dialects are actually regional variants of a spoken language of which the standardized form written in the Devnagri script is the official Hindi. Three-fifths of all Hindi speakers are concentrated in the two northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Of the remaining, about 17 per cent live in Madhya Pradesh and 12 per cent in Rajasthan. The rest of the Hindi- speaking population is found in Haryana, Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra and West Bengal (Fig. 6.5).

In terms of numerical strength Bengali comes next to Hindi. While its speakers are heavily concentrated in West Bengal, a sizeable proportion of Bengali speakers is also found in the neighbouring states of Assam, Bihar and Tripura. Marathi is next to Bengali. About 93 per cent of its speakers live in Maharashtra alone. However, Marathi is also spoken by a section of population in Karnataka as well as Madhya Pradesh. Urdu holds the fourth rank among the Indo-Aryan languages. Its core region overlaps with that of the Hindi.

While the domain of Punjabi lies in Punjab, it is widely spoken over the entire northwestern region, particularly Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and northern Rajasthan. Its ter­ritorial extent is wider as Punjabi is spoken in the neighbouring Punjab in Pakistan. Within India migration processes have taken Pun­jabi-speaking population to different parts of the country (Fig. 6.7).

In the east, almost 99 per cent of the Assamese speakers are confined to Assam. The domain of the Assamese is surrounded on the north, east, south-east and the south by Tibeto-Burman and Austric languages. There is a slight spill-over of the Assamese population into the neigh­bouring states of Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya (Fig. 6.8).

In fact, they mainly live in the littoral region in the neighbourhood of Goa. Some speakers of the Konkani have also dispersed to other neighbouring states, such as Kerala and Gujarat as well as the union territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli. Since the 1991 census was not conducted in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, the home of the Kashmiri language, it is difficult to describe the patterns of geographic distribution of the Kashmiri speakers.

Outside the state a population of 56,000 persons returned Kashmiri as their mother tongue. The Nepali-speaking population is distributed in a number of states, mostly in the neighbourhood of Ne­pal. Of the 2.07 million Nepali speakers, more than 40 per cent are concentrated in West Bengal and another 21 per cent in Assam. A small proportion (12.35 per cent) of the Nepali speakers is also found in Sikkim. They are scattered all over the northeast although in small numbers. The domain of Sindhi lies in the Sind province of the neigh­bouring state of Pakistan. The present Sindhi-speaking population in India, however, consists of population displaced in the wake of Parti­tion in 1947.

Initially, the Sindhis came to the neighbouring regions of Rajasthan and Gujarat. Later, they dispersed to other western and northern states. At the 1991 census, about two-thirds of all Sindhi speakers in India were enumerated in Gujarat and Maharashtra. Of the remaining one-third, the two states of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh shared together 15 per cent each. A small proportion of Sindhi speak­ers are also found in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.

Language Scene in Tribal Areas:

The language scene in tribal areas of India deserves a mention. During the 50 years since independence, the tribes have been exposed to di­verse influences—economic, political and socio-cultural. The scene in northeastern India is somewhat different. There, the tribes have been empowered to manage their own political affairs.

In other regions of India a certain number of seats have been reserved for the tribes to en­sure their representation in the state and the national legislative bodies. These measures have paved the way for their rehabilitation in the national polity. However, a majority of Indian tribes lives in the mid-Indian region where their participation in the political processes is nominal.

Their traditional habitats lie divided between several states. They do not have much of a say in policy formulation. This has left an imprint on their traditional culture, language and social struc­ture. Language seems to have suffered the most.

First, the developmental processes initiated since independence seem to have contributed towards the disintegration of tribal economies, and their communitarian way of life. The tribes have lost their hold on the for­est resources and have been forced to depend on the market forces. In fact, the free market economy has encircled completely the petty tribal commodity trade.

Secondly, expansion of primary education has brought tribal children face to face to a new cultural situation. In the course of schooling they have been exposed to the regional lan­guages of the states of their habitation. This has paved the way for their becoming bilingual. The ultimate effect is on their traditional dialects which are on the way to decline and eventual death.

It has been noted that the Indian tribes display a very high degree of diversity in their language affinity. Despite the relative isolation of the tribal communities there have been contact areas in which give- and-take between the tribal and non-tribal languages has continued throughout history.

The geographic patterning of tribal languages sug­gests that along the zone of contact between them and the non-tribes progressive interaction has resulted in the fusion of linguistic elements on either side. This is evident from the fact that while the tribes communicate mainly in the Nishada, Kirata and Dravidian languages, they have also adopted several speech-forms of the Indo-Aryan family. The incidence of bilingualism and multilingualism among the tribes has in­creased phenomenally.

One may develop an understanding of the linguistic plurality ob­served in tribal areas by selecting the case of Austric-speaking tribes. In India, the Austric-speaking tribes are grouped into Mon-Khmer and Munda branches of languages. We have already seen that the Munda- speaking zone extends over a vast area from the Aravallis in the west to the Raj Mahal hills in the east.

Language Shift:

A striking feature of the language scene in tribal areas is the growing shift in language affinity of the tribal communities. This fluid situ­ation in which the tribes are losing their linguistic identity and are being identified with languages spoken by other tribes or the dominant regional languages of the states in which they have been living is observed in many parts of India.

An evaluation of the census data reveals gaps between the numerical strength of the ethnic tribals, say the Mundas, Santals and the Gonds and those sections of the Munda, Santal and Gond population who declared their own dialects as their mother tongue, say at the 1961 census. This lack of conformity between ethnic identity and language affinity reveals the process of language shift in a significant way. There can be several plausible explanations for this phenomenon. It may be assumed that by 1961 a major shift in the linguistic/dialectal affinity of the Indian tribes had already taken place in certain regions of the country. The 1961 census may, however, be taken as a benchmark.

It may be assumed that as tribal/non-tribal interaction was growing, a section of the tribal population shifted to other dialects/ languages with which it has no traditional affinity. This shift to the dominant languages of the regions of their habitation indicated a process of language shift and assimilation into the regional languages. The language shift was, however, not necessarily from a tribal to a non-tribal dialect. In fact, several tribal groups shifted over to the other tribal dialects as contacts between them were growing fast.

As a result they lost their own traditional dialects. The 1961 census data on linguistic affinity of the tribal communities as revealed in their declaration of a particular language as their mother tongue makes it possible to analyze the following dimensions of language shift among the tribes:

(a) Tribes speaking a dialect with which they are traditionally identified. For example, Santals declaring the Santali as their mother tongue or Gonds declaring Gondi as their mother tongue. This reveals that the tribes in certain regions of the country display continuity in their language affinity. We may call it a case of language retention.

(b) Tribes declaring a regional language as their mother tongue. For example, Santals declaring Bengali as their mother tongue in West Bengal, or Gonds declaring Oriya as their mother tongue in Orissa. This shows the ongoing process of language shift indicating that the tribal communities are getting assimilated into

the dominant regional languages. Tribal regions where the process of regional development has brought tribes face to face to non-tribes have witnessed this phenomenon more significantly.

(c) Tribes on the periphery of their traditional areas have a tendency to declare as their mother tongue a language which is spoken by a dominant tribal group or the official language of a neighbouring state. This process indicates that the tribes are getting exposed to other tribal/regional languages. As a result they are getting assimilated into these languages (Table 6.8).

Language Retention:

While collection of data on mother tongues may replate with prob­lems, the position as recorded by the 1961 census was that one-half of the tribal population of India retained their own dialects as mother tongues. This was an evidence of language retention. The situation, however, varied from tribe to tribe and from region to region.

The geographic patterning of the tribes still claiming affinity to their own tribal dialects revealed three major formations:

(a) Areas of tribal fastness in which tribes were by and large living in a state of exclusivity. For example, in Mizoram, Manipur, Meghalaya, Tripura, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Rajasthan, and Himachal Pradesh, 70-100 per cent of tribes retained their traditional dialects as their mother tongue.

(b) Areas of tribal-non-tribal inter-mingling, where tribes were living in a state of varied degrees of exposure to non-tribal economic and cultural influences. One can cite the case of Assam, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Mysore (now Karnataka) where 25-60 per cent of tribes retained their own language.

(c) Areas where tribes have been assimilated into dominant cultures of the regions of their habitation. In these areas less than 10 per cent of the tribal population claimed affinity with their own traditional tribal dialect (Table 6.9).

A number of doctoral theses, written under the direction of this writer at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, explored these questions at length. In two of these theses the question of language shift and retention as registered among the Austric-speaking tribes of the mid-Indian region was examined.

These studies revealed that the Santals and Korkus by and large preferred to retain their traditional dialect.’ On the other hand, there were other Austric-speaking tribes who displayed a ten­dency of shift to the regional languages. The language shift was the highest among the Savaras. The Kharias, Mundas and the Hos fol­lowed.

Studies also revealed that the Bhils of Rajasthan, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh preferred to claim regional language as their mother tongue. A study of the household-level data generated through field- work from Wanera Para, Umedgarhi, Nai Abadi and Regania villages of Bagidora tehsil of Banswara district, as well as from Banswara town, revealed that the Bhils by and large maintained Bhili as their mother tongue.

On the other hand, the Korkus of Punasa, Richhi and Udaipur villages of Khandwa district tended to switch over to the re­gional languages. In fact, they declared Nimadi as their mother tongue. However, no generalizations can be made about Korkus on this basis as in other villages they continue to retain their own dialect and declare it as their mother tongue at the successive censuses.

Another finding of this research is that tribes living in rural areas have a greater affinity with their traditional dialects as compared to the tribes in urban areas. In regions of tribal concentration, for exam­ple, tribes enjoyed a certain degree of isolation which helped them retain their language and culture.

Their stay in cities and towns, on the other hand, diluted their cultural identity and their language was the first casualty. Investigations at the household level confirmed the language shift among the Mundas of Ranchi town and the Korkus of Khandwa tehsil, East Nimar district. On the contrary, the Bhils of Banswara district, the Santals of Santal Parganas, the Korkus of Khalwa tehsil (East Nimar district) and the Mundas of the rural parts of Ranchi district have continued to retain their language.

The study noted a strong correlation between language shift and a number of as­sociated factors, such as urbanization, proportion of Hinduized tribes, and the proportion of non-primary workers. Literacy also revealed a high positive correlation with language shift. In fact, the school-going tribal children were receiving education through the medium of re­gional languages.

Obviously, schooling became a powerful instrument of bilingualism and/or language shift. In terms of exposure of the mid- Indian tribes to regional languages, Bhils stand first, followed by Mundas, Korkus and Santals. In any case, loss of language is sympto­matic of the loss of cultural identity.

While the incidence of bilingualism among the Indian tribes is very high,’ it does not mean that they have always retained their traditional languages. This is un­derstandable in view of the fact that most of the tribes are getting exposed to external influences, particularly at the schools and the mar­ket places. Interaction at these places is possible through a common language, generally a regional language or pidgin, such as the Sadan/Sadari in Ranchi, which is adopted by the tribes for day-to-day communication. Back at their homes, their own dialect reigns su­preme. This may not be true for the displaced tribals whose number is increasing day by day.

Related Articles:

• Linguistic Diversity in India
• Classification of Tribal Groups of India – Essay

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Essay On Our National Language – Hindi

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Hindi is the national language of India. It is a dialect group of languages, spoken in Northern and Central India. It is one of the official languages of India and is the most widespread language of India. Hindi is spoken by almost half a billion people in India and in other parts of the world. After Mandarin, Spanish and English, Hindi is the fourth most spoken language in the world.

Hindi is mainly written in Devanagari script also called Nagari’. Devanagari consists of 11 vowels and 33 consonants. Hindi is written from left to right. Indian states where Hindi is widely spoken are Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and national capital territory of New Delhi. Some of the dialects of Hindi are Bundeli, Marwari, Bhojpuri, Maithili, etc.

The Constituent Assembly adopted Hindi as an Official Language of the Union on 14 September 1949. Hence, this day is celebrated as ‘Hindi Day’. Hindi is spoken as a first language by more than 400 million people across the world. As a second language, more than 120 million people speak Hindi. Some Hindi speaking groups are also found in countries like Uganda, Bangladesh, South Africa and Yemen.

In some regions of India, learning of Hindi is considered less important. The main reason may be that all the knowledge of science, technology and business is available mostly in English. Speaking Hindi in public places, offices, schools and colleges is sometimes considered against one’s prestige. There is a need to discourage this tendency if we are keen that the status of Hindi has to be raised. We should give Hindi its due honour, only then our national character will be retained. Hindi speaking people should promote the use of more Hindi in their day-to-day life.

Once a great national leader expressed that, no country in the world can make progress depending on foreign language. What is the reason behind it? A foreign language cannot be the language of people. As far as India is concerned, English has made a gap between the people who know English and those who do not know. This can be dangerous for the progress of the country. We should not tolerate English educated high-class people on one hand and large groups of uneducated people on the other hand. One cannot even imagine that in future the medium of education in India can be English. Hindi or the regional languages must be more encouraged as the medium of instruction and communication.

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National Language of India 2023, List of 22 Official Languages of India

India is the land of various language and cultural diversity. Check here all about National Language of India 2023 as per Indian Constitution and List of 22 Official Languages of India.

Table of Contents

National Language of India

Every region of India has a different culture, making it a diversified nation. Each of the 28 states and 8 Union Territories that make up this union represents its own unique cultural heritage and dialect. There are 22 scheduled languages in all, and they are all extensively spoken in various states, according to the eighth schedule of the Indian constitution . It was challenging to choose the national language of India because there are so many different languages spoken there. Know the national language of India inside and out for example What is the language spoken in India?, Which language is India’s national tongue and many more here.

• With numerous ethnic cultures, traditions, and languages, India is a democratic nation. Different ethnic groups in India speak a wide range of languages.
• The phrase “Indian language changes every few kilometres just like the water” is true when referring to the country’s language. This is true in every sense, thus it makes sense. India, a union of 28 states plus 8 union territories, has a wide range of languages that shift every few kilometres.
• There have been numerous discussions on the national language since the Constitution’s inception. India does not, however, have a national language.

India’s National Language and an official language are two different things. You will learn more about India’s official language and the National Language of India in this article with all aspects.

National Language of India as per Constitution

Due to the country’s cultural variety, none of the languages are given the status of the National Language of India. In India, less than 44% of the population speaks Hindi. For many years, there has been discussion about making Hindi an official language, but with no success. As per the Indian constitution, there is no language that is designated as India’s national language till date. To be used for official purposes across the nation, Hindi and English have been designated as the official languages.

Constitutional Provisions

Article 343(1) of the Indian Constitution states that Hindi written in Devanagari will be the official language of the Union. The international version of Indian numerals shall be utilized for all official purposes of the Union.

Only Hindi or English is allowed for official business in the Indian parliament and government buildings. In the entire nation, English may be used for official purposes, including legislative proceedings, correspondence between the Central Government and a State Government, and legal processes.

• In accordance with Article 343, the Central Government only communicates with the states in the Hindi Belt in Hindi.
• When interacting with the states, English is to be used as an Associate Official Language.

List of 22 Official Languages of India

The eighth schedule of the Indian Constitution recognizes 22 different languages. Articles 343 to 351 of Part XVII of the Indian Constitution address the country’s official tongues.

The remaining languages were eventually added, following a number of changes, as initially only 14 languages were specified. Check here the list of all 22 Indian languages that the Indian Constitution recognizes.

National Language Vs Official Language

Any language that is spoken by a sizable portion of a country’s population is considered the national language. It serves social, cultural, and political purposes. The language used for official activity, such as in the national court, parliament, or for business purposes, is often acknowledged and adopted by the government or in the legislature.

In accordance with Article 343, the Central Government shall communicate with the Hindi States in Hindi. When communicating with the states, English is to be utilized as an associate official language. Hindi and English are therefore the official languages of India, not the national languages, as stated in the Constitution.

How Many Languages in India?

India contains 1599 other languages in addition to its 122 major languages, according to the 2001 Census of India. However, data from other sources varies, partly because “language” and “dialect” are defined differently in different sources. In the 2001 Census, it was noted that 122 languages were spoken by more than 10,000 persons, and 30 languages were spoken by more than a million native speakers.

How Many Languages Are Spoken in India?

India, behind Papua New Guinea (840), has the second-highest number of languages, according to the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (780). Ethnologue gives a lower figure of 456, however. The 2011 Census of India identified 270 mother tongues with 10,000 or more speakers each. Included in them are “123 mother tongues grouped under the Scheduled Languages and 147 mother tongues grouped under the Non-Scheduled Languages.” The unscheduled languages include Bhili (10 million speakers) and Gangte (16,000 speakers).

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National Language of India FAQs

What is the official language of india.

The eighth schedule of the Indian Constitution recognizes 22 different languages. Articles 343 to 351 of Part XVII of the Indian Constitution address the country's official tongues.

How many languages have been recognized in the eighth schedule of the Indian constitution?

The eighth schedule of the Indian Constitution recognizes 22 different languages.

What are the 22 Official languages of India?

Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu are the 22 Official languages of India.

Is Hindi the national language of India?

Hindi is not India's national language; it is an official language.

Which are the most spoken languages of India?

In India, the languages spoken the most frequently are Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, and Tamil.

Does India have a national language?

At present, India has no national language, but as per the article 343(1) of the constitution of India Hindi in Devanagari script and English are the official languages in India.

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Rose Deller

December 13th, 2018.

Language Movements and Democracy in India

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Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

In this feature essay,  Language Movements and Democracy in India , Mithilesh Kumar Jha draws on his recent book Language Politics and Public Sphere in North India   (Oxford UP). In the piece, he argues that capturing the real and continuing tensions and challenges of democratic practices in India requires attention to how they are performed and understood within its numerous vernacular spheres, drawing particularly on the linguistic movements that have asserted the importance of ‘minor’ or ‘non-scheduled’ languages in the nation.

This essay is part of the  LSE RB Translation and Multilingualism Week , running between 10 and 14 December 2018. If you are interested in this topic, all posts published as part of the week can be accessed  here . If you would like to contribute on this topic in the future, please contact us at  [email protected] . 

Language movements have been debated in numerous ways since the beginning of modern vernacular education and classificatory exercises during colonial rule. During the nationalist phase, the question of ‘national’ language became, politically and emotionally, a very charged issue. The Hindi-Urdu debate is well-known and widely explored. In the first few decades after independence, India witnessed numerous linguistic riots, the linguistic reorganisation of states and clashes between supporters of Hindi and resistances to its ‘imposition’ as the ‘national’ language, especially from speakers of Tamil and other South Indian languages.

Since then, the language issue is seen as more or less settled, although there have been various studies that critically examine the Hindi-Urdu debates, the making of Hindi as the ‘national’ language, or the making of modern Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Panjabi and so on. But there are very few studies using language movements to understand the progress and limits of Indian democracy and its various contradictions. At best, language movements are treated merely as an identity issue. If they promote Hindi or other ‘major’ Indian languages, they are welcomed or promoted. But if they promote other ‘minor’ or ‘non-scheduled’ languages – i.e. the languages which are not part of the eighth schedule of the Indian constitution, such as Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Braj, Tulu, Bodo and so on – they are not only discouraged but also suspected.

Image Credit: Jalamb Junction Railway Station, Jalamb, Maharashtra, India, with station name in three languages (English, Hindi and the local language, in this case Marathi) ( Ganesh Dhamodkar CC BY SA 2.0 )

Language, with the beginning of print and the expansion of nationalism, is at the root of all modern social and political imaginaries. It simultaneously connects the self emotionally and psychologically with community, and that makes language a very powerful tool for social and political mobilisations. In the imaginaries of the nation, the role of a ‘national’ language is of prime ideological importance: the growth and development of one’s language is now seen as the growth and development of self and community. In modern India, Bhartendu Harishchandra’s (1850-85; a Benares-based Hindi writer and poet, also regarded as the father of the Hindi renaissance) idea of nija bhasha unnat ahai sab unnat kee mool (in the development of one’s language lies the roots of all development) became the rallying point for various linguistic communities in north India. However, this makes the language issue in a multilingual country like India even more problematic, especially when ‘minor’ and ‘non-scheduled’ languages begin to assert their demands and concerns. Usually, these movements are seen as parochial and impediments to the growth and expansion of the ‘national’ language – Hindi. However, millions of speakers of Indian languages continue to make sense of and participate in the democratic process through their vernaculars. Linguistic movements and assertions continuously alter and expand the meaning and practices of democracy in India. Therefore, without engaging with these, one’s understanding of Indian democracy shall always be incomplete or partial.

In the linguistic economy of India, we have the English elite at the top, followed by bilingual or trilingual elites with knowledge of English and one or more Indian languages. They have played a historical role in transmitting ideas like democracy or nation or swaraj (self-rule) in various vernacular spheres. Below them are the vast majority of monolingual masses with very little or no knowledge of Hindi, let alone English. In this kind of linguistic economy, one can very well infer the limits of one’s understanding of Indian democracy or polity if it takes into account the concerns of only one particular community. The majority of linguistic communities in India are still grappling with the questions of modernity, democracy, swaraj , nation and so on. And they are willing to reconcile their concerns with the nation’s, but not at the cost of their mother tongues. This make the issue of language and democracy in India even more fascinating.

Rammanohar Lohia (1910-67), the socialist ideologue, in his staunch opposition to English, understood the valuable role of Indian languages in the democratisation of state and society. He wanted Indian languages to be elevated to the status of English. However, the linguistic situation in India is very far from this ideal. English continues to be a ticket to enter into the ruling class of India. And it continues to reproduce a wide gulf between the elite and the masses. Shall India ever overcome this contradiction? Do linguistic movements have the potential to radically alter the privileges associated with a particular language?

Language, although in a limited sense, did provide a modern secular tool for people to connect together by transcending the boundries of caste, religion, class and gender. And a critical understanding of the rise and assertion of linguistic movements in different parts of the country will help one understand processes of domination and subordination. With the standardisation of a language, many languages, even those with rich literary histories, have lost their status, but the speakers of these languages are conscious of their distinctiveness. And when the opportune time comes, they do assert this. Many linguistic movements emerged as a challenge to their appropriation by a standard language. In north India, the speakers of Maithili, Bhojpuri, Awadhi and Braj are making such claims.

There is another aspect to these linguistic movements. There are tendencies towards reproducing the age-old and existing hierarchies within them, even when these movements have been fighting against their appropriation by a standard or ‘major’ language. Within their own spheres, they also try to marginalise their own ‘varieties’ or ‘sub/dialects’. Often these movements are appropriated by the dominant castes and classes. But it is also in these spheres that such dominations are challenged and countered. For example, in the Maithili movement, the leadership has been exclusively in the hands of upper caste Brahmins and Kayasthas. But such hegemony is being increasingly questioned in the movement’s contemporary phase. To democratise the state and its institutions, it is essential to democratise society. Can it be done without democratising vernacular spheres where real battles between democratic and undemocratic forces are fought every day?

Language movements in India provide a valuable source for understanding the trajectories of ideas like democracy, swaraj and nation in modern India. Indeed, deeper engagements with Indian languages and their literary spheres will not only broaden our understanding of Indian democracy and its various challenges, but also the entanglements of these communities with modernity. Were imaginaries in these vernacular spheres distinct from national imaginaries? How did these hierarchical societies and communities reconcile with modern ideals like democracy or equal citizenship? In other words, the real entanglements of democracy in India can be better explained by closely engaging with modern Indian languages and their public spheres. These spheres are not necessarily democratic, but without making them such, trajectories of Indian democracy shall always be incomplete.

Dr. Mithilesh Kumar Jha teaches political science in the Department of Humanities and Social Science, IIT Guwahati. His most recent publication is Language Politics and Public Sphere in North India: Making of the Maithili Movement (OUP 2018).

Note: This feature essay gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics. 

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India Essay

India is the seventh-largest country and most populous democracy in the world. It is located in South Asia and was officially declared as the Republic of India after its independence from British rule. India has unique topographical features – plains of central India, rain forests of the north east, icy cold Himalayan region and dry arid desert in west, among others. The cultural, linguistic and religious diversity of India is as much diverse as its geography.

Indian culture differs from place to place and is a union of several different cultures, spread across the length and breadth of the continent. Although there are 22 Languages imbibed in the Constitution of India, there are more than 1900 dialects or mother tongues are spoken throughout the nation. This huge cultural and linguistic diversity of India is one of its most distinguished features.

Long and Short Essay on India in English

India is one of the famous countries of the world. Every citizen of India must know about it means its history, struggle, culture and other important things.

Students are generally given this topic in their schools to write some paragraphs or full essay in the class tests or main exams.

Here we have given below long and short essay on India, which are well written essay on India to help students under various word limits.

They can select anyone of these India essay according to the words limit:

India Essay 1 (100 words)

India is a famous country all over the world. Geographically, our country is located to the south of Asia continent. India is a high population country and well protected from all directions naturally. It is a famous country for its great cultural and traditional values all across the world. It contains a mountain called Himalaya which is biggest in the world.

It is surrounded by the three big oceans from three directions such as in south with Indian Ocean, in east with Bay of Bengal and in west with Arabic sea. India is a democratic country ranks second for its population. The national language of India is Hindi however almost fourteen nationally recognized languages are spoken here.

India Essay 2 (150 words)

India is a beautiful country and famous all over the world for its unique cultures and traditions. It is famous for its historical heritages and monuments. Citizens here are very polite and understanding in nature. It was a slave country earlier to the 1947 under the British rule.

However, after many years of hard struggles and sacrifices of the great Indian freedom fighters, India got freedom from the British rule in 1947. Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru became the first Prime Minister of India and hoisted the Indian flag when India got freedom and he proclaimed that “When the world sleeps, India will wake to life and freedom”.

India is a democratic country where its public are authorized to take decisions for the betterment of the country. India is a famous country for the saying “Unity in Diversity” because people of many religions, castes, culture and tradition live together with unity. Most of the Indian heritages and monuments have been added to the world heritage sites.

India Essay 3 (200 words)

India is my mother country and I love it very much. People of India are very honest and truthful in nature. People of various unique traditions and culture live here together without any problem. The mother-tongue of my country is Hindi however many languages are spoken here by the people of different religions without any boundation. India is a great country of natural beauty where great people took birth from time to time and did great works. Indians are very heart-touching in nature and they heartily welcome their guests from other countries.

In India Indian philosophy of life is followed which is called as Sanatan Dharma and has become the main factor to maintain unity in diversity here. India is a republic country where its citizens have power to take decision about country.

There are many natural sceneries, places, monuments, historical heritage of the ancient time, etc which attracts people’s mind from every corner of the world. India is very famous for its spiritual works, Yoga, martial arts, etc. A huge crowd of pilgrims and devotees come here to see and enjoy the beauty of famous places, temples and other world heritage sites in India.

India Essay 4 (250 words)

My country India is a land of Shiva, Parvati, Krishna, Hanuman, Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda, Kabir, etc. It is a country where great people took birth and did great works. I love my country very much and salute it. It is famous for its biggest democracy and oldest civilization of the world. It is the second most populous country of the world after the chain.

It is a country where courteous people of many religions and cultures lives together. It is a country of great warriors such as Rana Pratap, Shivaji, Lal Bahadur Shashtri, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Patel, Subhash Chandra Bose, Bagat Singh, Lala Lajpet Rai and so many.

It is a rich country where great people took birth in the field of literature, art and science such as Rabindranath Tagore, Sara Chandra, Premchand, C.V. Raman, Jagadish Chandra Bose, APJ Abdul Kalama, Kabir Das, etc. Such great people of India were the proud of my country. All the great leaders of the country came from villages and led the country to go ahead.

They fought for many years and sacrificed their lives to make India an independent country from the British rule. It is a country where famous rivers and oceans are run regularly such as Ganges, Yamuna, Godavari, Narmada, Brahmaputra, Krishna, Kavery, Bay of Bengal, Arabic sea, etc. India is a beautiful country surrounded by the oceans from three sides. It is a country where people are very intellectual and spiritual and believe in God and Goddess.

India Essay 5 (300 words)

India is my motherland country where I took birth. I love India and have proud of it. India is a big democratic country which ranks second in population after China. It has rich and glorious past. It is considered as the country of old civilization of the world. It is a land of learning where students from many corners of the world come to study in the big universities.

It is famous for its various unique and diverse culture and tradition of people of many religions. Some people in the abroad as well follow the Indian culture and tradition because of being attractive in nature. Various invaders came and steal the glory and precious things of India. Some of them made it a slave country however various great leaders of the country became successful in making my motherland free of biritshers in 1947.

The day our country got freedom means 15 th of August is celebrated every year as Independence Day. Pt. Nehru became the first prime minister of India. It is a country rich in natural resources yet inhabitants here are poor. It is growing continuously in the field of technology, science and literature because of the eminent people like Rabindra Nath Tagore, Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose, Sir C.V.Raman, Shri H. N. Bhabha, etc. It is a peace loving country where people of many religions follow their own culture and tradition as well as celebrate their festivals without any interference.

There are many glorious historical buildings, heritages, monuments and sceneries which attracts people’s mind from different countries every year. Taj Mahal is a great monument in India and symbol of eternal love and Kashmir as the heaven on the earth. It is a country of famous temples, mosques, churches, Gurudwaras, rivers, valleys, fertile plains, highest mountain, etc.

India Essay 6 (400 words)

India is my country and I proud to be an Indian. It ranks as the seventh largest country of the world as well as second most populated country of the world. It is also known as Bharat, Hindustan and Aryavart. It is a peninsula means surrounded by oceans from three sides such as Bay of Bengal in east, Arabian Sea in west and Indian Ocean in south. The national animal of India is tiger, national bird is peacock, national flower is lotus and national fruit is mango.

The flag of India has tricolor, saffron means purity (the uppermost), white means peace (the middle one having an Ashok Chakra) and green means fertility (the lowest one). Ashok Chakra contains equally divided 24 spokes. The national anthem of India is “Jana Gana Mana”, the national song is “Vande Mataram” and national sport is Hockey.

India is a country where people speak many languages and people of different castes, creeds, religions and cultures live together. That’s why India is famous for common saying of “unity in diversity”. It is well known as the land of spirituality, philosophy, science and technology. People of various religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Islam, Christianity and Judaism lives here together from the ancient time.

It is famous country for its agriculture and farming which are the backbones of it from the ancient time. It uses it own produced food grains and fruits. It is a famous tourist’s paradise because it attracts people’s mind from all over the world. It is rich in monuments, tombs, churches, historical buildings, temples, museums, scenic beauty, wild life sanctuaries, places of architecture, etc are the source of revenue to it.

It is the place where Taj Mahal, Fatehpur Sikri, golden temple, Qutab Minar, Red Fort, Ooty, Nilgiris, Kashmir, Kajuraho, Ajanta and Ellora caves, etc wonders exist. It is the country of great rivers, mountains, valleys, lakes and oceans. The national language of India is Hindi. It is a country where 29 states and UTs. It has 28 states which again have many small villages.

It is a chief agricultural country famous for producing sugarcane, cotton, jute, rice, wheat, cereals etc crops. It is a country where great leaders (Shivaji, Gandhiji, Nehru, Dr. Ambedkar, etc), great scientists (Dr. Jagadeeshchandra Bose, Dr Homi Bhabha, Dr. C. V Raman, Dr. Naralikar, etc) and great reformers (Mother Teresa, Pandurangashastri Alhavale, T. N. Sheshan) took birth. It is a country where diversity exists with strong unity and peace.

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Long and Short Essay on India’s National Language (Hindi) for Children and Students

October 7, 2019 by studymumbai Leave a Comment

Long and Short Essay on Hindi, India’s national language, for Children and Students. also find essays on Hindi Diwas.

Know India Through Hindi (582 Words)

A country’s official language is very important for its growth and development. First and foremost this is the medium a large percentage of its constituents as they engage in all sorts of activities throughout the nation. It is also the very thing that distinctly takes the said country apart from its neighbors across the globe. As such it is considered an important treasure that gives every member of that nation pride and glory. Let’s take a look and learn at how the Indian language of Hindi came on top of the list.

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The Hindi belt which is comprised primarily by parts of northern and central India is dominated by the usage of the country’s official language. The term Hindi is identified with the Indo-Aryan language and also with some of the dialect continuum of the language. According to the 2001 census in India around 41 percent of the native speakers within the country utilize Hindi dialects.

The Constitution of India states that Hindi is part of the two official spoken communications, English being the other form. It is main cog of the mode of communication used by the Indian federal and central government and is also one of the 22 scheduled languages as mandated in the 8th Schedule of the Constitution. According to the pages of Indian history, Hindi traces its roots from Prakrit. It is also stated in the books that at the end of the tenth century Hindi came into the picture via dialects such as Awadhi, Braj, and Khari Boli.

Hindi is the leading contender among India’s national languages as it is used to communicate in areas of states like Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, and Himachal Pradesh. It is also employed as an alternative language along with northern and central India languages such as Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, and Punjabi. It is also widely accepted past the borders of India into countries like Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Moving on, Hindi is written using the method of the Devanagari script which was present during the ancient times when Sanskrit was around. Sounds that are readily found in the Sanskrit are represented by the addition of dots on letters of the Devanagari that depicts the same kind of sound. The rules of grammar construction in the Hindi form are quite unorthodox. Let’s identify with them and see why.

By now you have been accustomed to the English format of subject-verb-object. In Hindi grammar the format that is followed is subject-object-verb which simply means that the verbs are commonly found at the last part of the sentence instead of being placed before the object. Hindi also employs the method of split ergativity wherein the verbs coincide with the object in the sentence instead of having more connection with the subject.

The article the is not utilized in Hindi instead the numeral one is the one that implies an indefinite singular article which is commonly the job of a/an. Postpositions are the ones present in the Hindi grammar which are like prepositions but are placed after the nouns.

There are also notable differences on the use of different tenses, variations in cases, gender, and interrogatives. Conventional punctuations are utilized like question marks, commas, and exclamation points but a vertical line is traditionally used in place of periods to signify the end of a sentence.

The Indian language of Hindi may seem difficult to learn but if you put your best put forward you can surely learn it.

StudyMumbai.com is an educational resource for students, parents, and teachers, with special focus on Mumbai. Our staff includes educators with several years of experience. Our mission is to simplify learning and to provide free education. Read more about us .

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Incredible India Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on incredible india.

India represents “Unity in Diversity” . Our country is a mixture of cultures, regions, traditions, diversity in food, languages, etc. Our people of India are so polite, understanding and helping in nature. The national bird of India is Peacock and is very beautiful. India is so incredible and is full of colors and has the tiger as its national animal, hockey as its national game, etc. the national language or mother tongue of our country is Hindi. Indians are also so talented and have shown very high growth. The I.T. sector of our country shows accelerating growth due to intelligent software engineers.

India As a Country

India is the seventh-largest country by its geographical area and is located in South Asia. The beauty surrounds our country from each and every aspect. India is also known by two other names Bharat and Hindustan and the people of India are known as Indians. The national anthem of our country is “ Jan Gan Man ” and the national song of our country is “Sare Jahan Se Achcha”.

India is a Democratic country where people themselves choose their leader and live with freedom i.e. they can do anything they wish to within the limits of the law. If any citizen of India tries to harm any other person, there are also rules and regulations to punish him in order to make him realize his mistake.

Our country is also incredible because of its beautiful mountains, lakes, forests , seas, oceans, etc. Many foreigners each year visit India to see the beauty of our country that is its rich historical temples, its traditions, its language, its heritage, etc.

Different Regions of India

North region.

North Region consists of the most incredible thing in the world that is The Himalayas which is the highest mountain in the world. This region also consists of the beautiful Kashmir covered with mountains. It consists of Uttar Pradesh which is mainly known as the land of Krishna, land of Rama, etc. This region also consists of one of the wonders of the world i.e. Taj Mahal which people come to visit across the world.

Southern Region

This is the “Land of Nawabs”. It is famous for its festivals, food, and languages. The place is famous for its rice dishes. This region consists of cities like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka, etc.

East Region

East part of  India consists of West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, Odisha,  etc. The capital of West Bengal, Kolkata is the largest city of this section and is the metropolitan city and is the third’s largest city in the country. Kolkata is known for its sweetness and festival.

West Region

The West part of the country is really incredible as it is covered with sands and deserts. Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra are the three most amazing places in this region. The culture, the language, the traditions and the clothes of this region are incredible and you will love to visit this region.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Indian Culture and Religion

India’s culture is among the world’s oldest; civilization in India began about 4,500 years ago. India has 29 states with different culture and civilizations and one of the most populated countries in the world. The Indian culture, often labeled as a mixture of several various cultures.

India gave birth to Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and other religions. They are now collectively known as Indian religions. Today, Hinduism and Buddhism are the third and fourth-largest religions respectively of the world. Although India is a secular Hindu-majority country, it has a large Muslim population.

India, being a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious society, celebrates holidays and festivals of various religions. Major festivals include Diwali, Durga puja, Holi, Ganesh puja, Navratri, Rath yatra, etc are there round the year.

Indian food is a cosmopolitan cuisine that has so many ingredients. It is as diverse as India. Indian recipes use numerous ingredients, deploy a wide range of food preparation styles, cooking techniques, and culinary presentation. Thus the tastes of same food like salads, sauces, vegetables, meat, desserts vary from region to region.

We are proud of our cultural distinctiveness. We are proud to be the inhabitants of India. It is our duty to maintain its unique feature. We have to think beyond the petty interests and work for the broader goals of bringing prosperity and progress in society.

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Essay on “Hindi Our National Language” Complete Essay for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Hindi Our National Language

Essay No. 01

Hindi is our national language and English has been retained as Associate National Language, due to its insistent and persistent demand from South India where the people in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh. Karnataka and Kerala, do not Properly understand Hindi and they do not want the Hindi should be imposed on  them, which is a language of the North and not of the South. In the beginning it was planned to retain English for ten years a lingua franca- language used  for general communication in the  country- but now it has been declared as  Associated National Language and is being retained indefinitely until Hindi does Indeed become the true National Language.

Hindi is the  National Language adopted by the Constituent Assembly soon  after the achievement of independence in 1947. But millions in India still do not know Hindi. It is because it has been made difficult by the introduction of Sanskrit terms in it. The conception of Mahatma Gandhi and Subhash Chandra Bose of Hindi as a national language was that of Hindustani- a mixture of Hindi and Urdu. But over the years we have not been able to give the status of National Language to Hindi continues to be a wasteful exercise as all the knowledge of Science and Technology, business and administration is available in English. Hindi has not been able to replace English even after more than fifty years of our independence. English is gaining  more and  more importance even in Northern India especially in Principal cities like Delhi. Speaking of Hindi in public of low- status. There is a need to discourage this trend but for that the status of Hindi has to be raised. Hindi has to be given its due honour then only can we retain its National Character. In the first instance we can restrict the use of English in correspondence, speech and records in government offices, courts and parliamentary affairs. Instead it is observed that English has almost totally replaced Hindi in offices, courts and parliament. There is no doubt  that the international importance   of English compels us to learn it vigorously for the international interaction but it has to stop somewhere. Care has to be taken that our future generations would also learn Hindi as it is felt that if the present trend continues going within a next hundred years Hindi will be quite Greek to our people and only buried within the confines of libraries and museums.           

As such we have to take steps to save our National Language from extinction. There are schools where Hindi is not taught at all. Every parent takes it a pride to let his child start speaking English before Hindi. We will have to made Hindi simpler and free it from difficult Sanskrit versions. Some incentives to students standing out exclusively in Hindi have also to be introduced otherwise we will have to see a bad day for the eland of Hindi, that is, Hindustan.

Essay No. 02

Our National Language

India is a vast country. It is a land of divergent communities, divergent caste, divergent language, divergent manners and customs.

The multiplicity of language when the bus was advancing towards my destination, I started moving towards the exit door.

I could hardly set my foot on the ground, when the bus moved. I fell headlong on the road. To my surprise, some pick pocket had relieved me of my purse.

The button of my shirt was missing. I thanked God that I was alive. It is generally understood that in India National Language changes after every looking.

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Hindi as the National language- advantages and disadvantages.

India is linguistically diverse country. Starting from Jammu - Kashmir in north to Kanyakumari in south an Gujrat in West to Arunachal Pradesh in east, people speak different languages and dialect. Few of them are - Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telgu, Kannada, Malyalam, Urdu, Marwari, Haryanvi etc. Indian constitution considers 15 languages as national languages and English and Hindi as the official languages. From the time before independence to present time, there has always been controversy regarding "One India - One language" and imposing Hindi as the national language.

People who support 'Hindi imposition' as the national language believe that Hindi language represents our culture.They also believe that promotion of hindi must be a matter of respect for all Indians. Also, if it is made the national language, it will gradually spread worldwide and gain recognition, as India ranks second in the population across the globe.They also pressume that of all the indigenous languages only Hindi is understood all over the country. They are unaware of the reality.

The reality is that majority of Indians donot know Hindi. According to 2001 census figures, just 45% people speak or know Hindi. Only 25% people in India have declared Hindi as their mother tongue language. The remaining people speak variants of Hindi like Bhojpuri, Magadhi, Maithili, Rajasthani, Marwari,etc. All put together, the speakers of Hindi and its dialects are about 45%. It proves that remaining 55% speak non-Hindi languages and majority of people in India don't even know Hindi.

Some Hindi supporters argue that Hindi can be made compulsory and everyone will learn it over a period of time. This is only because they might not aware of the pain of learning a new language. Hindi is same to the non – Hindi as English is to all Indians – 'a foreign language'. There are people who know and understand Hindi but when it comes to expressing their views or giving presentations, they are not comfortable with it. Moreover, instead or spending so much of time and energy in learning a new language, wont they prefer spending the same in learning science and technology or computer skills ? So, languages should be used for convenience and not be imposed.

People might say and in fact its true also that language has created a gap among the people within the country itself. This can be solved by making a common language like English as the national language. Doing this wil not give an unfair advantage to anyone. Moreover, English is the medium of education in most of the schools and is also internationally accepted language.So why not unify the nation by bridging the gaps among people in the country and at the same time become the global citizens as well.

One might feel that becoming global citizens make us less patriotic. But is patriotism merely in languages , No not at all. Patriotism is not in showing off things to outside world without any harmony within the country boundary, instead it is a strong internal emotion which makes you respect the multilingualism in the country and keep it united.

Also, preservation of culture as been an old age argument against any kind of change. If we were to be preserving culture, then it should have been Sanskrit we should have been talking about and not Hindi.

I would like to say that rather than imposing any specific state or regional language as the national language and arguing over such issues, we must think of ways and means of making a common language 'English' reach each and every citizen of the country, so that justice is done to everyone. By doing so we will not only bridge the gap between various parts of the country, but also move forward as ' India – as a united nation'.

Related Essay

• One nation one language pros and cons
• Hindi as the National Language - Pros & Cons
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राष्ट्रभाषा हिन्दी पर निबंध- Essay on National Language in Hindi

In this article, we are providing an Essay on National Language in Hindi / Essay on Rashtrabhasha Hindi. राष्ट्रभाषा हिन्दी पर निबंध | Nibandh in 200, 300, 500, 600, 800 words For class 3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12 Students.  

Rashtra Bhasha Hindi Essay ( 300 words )

प्रस्तावना- हम भारतीय लोग बचपन से बोलना शुरू करते हैं तब पहला शब्द हमारा हिंदी का ही होता है और उस हिंदी भाषा के सहारे ही हम दुनिया के तमाम तरह के जज्बात, भावनाओं को व्यक्त कर पाते हैं। लेकिन जब बात आए सम्मान की तो हम हिचकते हैं हिंदी को अपनी मातृभाषा कहते हुए।

हमारी राष्ट्रभाषा हिन्दी पर हम सब गर्व तो करते हैं, फिर भी हिंदी को बोलने में हमें शर्म क्यों आती हैं। हम कहीं बाहर जाकर किसी से मिलते हैं तो हिंदी के बजाय अंग्रेजी में बात करने को ज्यादा मान्यता देते हैं।

दुनिया मे बोली जाने वाली अनेकों भाषाएं है, लेकिन उनमें से एक भाषा जिसमें हम बड़ी सहजता के साथ अपनी भावनाओं को व्यक्त करते हैं  ‘हमारी राष्ट्रभाषा कहलाती है’ । हमारी राष्ट्रभाषा पूरी दुनिया मे हमारी बोली, हमारी सभ्यता को एक पहचान देती है।

14 सितंबर वर्ष 1949 में संविधान सभा ने एक बैठक में राष्ट्रभाषा के बारे में वार्तालाप की, जिसके बाद कई राजकीय भाषाओं को राष्ट्रभाषा बनाने का सुझाव दिया गया, लेकिन उस समय भी ज्यादातर लोग हिंदी के पक्ष में खड़े थे जिसके बाद बहुमत के साथ हिंदी को राष्ट्रभाषा का दर्जा दे दिया गया।

प्रत्येक वर्ष हम 14 सितंबर को हिंदी दिवस के रूप में मनाते हैं, इस दिन सरकारी और गैरसरकारी स्थानों पर आयोजन किए जाते हैं और बड़े-बड़े भाषण के साथ हिंदी को मां का दर्जा भी दिया जाता है।

उपसंहार- हमें चाहिए कि जो हम इज्जत हिंदी को दुनिया के सामने देने का ढोंग करते हैं, उसे असल जिंदगी में भी दें। जिससे हमारी हिंदी भाषा दुनिया में तरक्की कर सके बिल्कुल वैसे जैसे आज अंग्रेजी भाषा भारत सहित दुनिया के तमाम देशों में अपनी पहचान बनाए हुए है।

Rashtrabhasha Hindi Par Nibandh ( 800 words )

प्रस्तावना- ‘राष्ट्र’ शब्द का प्रयोग किसी देश तथा वहाँ बसने वाले लोगों के लिए किया जाता है। प्रत्येक राष्ट्र का अपना स्वतंत्र अस्तित्व होता है। उसमें विभिन्न जातियों एवं धर्मों के लोग रहते हैं। विभिन्न स्थानों अथवा प्रांतों में रहने वाले लोगों की भाषा भी अलग-अलग होती है। इस भिन्नता के साथ-साथ उनमें एकता भी बनी रहती है। पूरे राष्ट्र के शासन का एक केद्र होता है। अत: राष्ट्र की एकता को और दृढ़ बनाने के लिए एक ऐसी भाषा की आवश्यकता होती है, जिसका प्रयोग संपूर्ण राष्ट्र में महत्वपूर्ण कार्यों के लिए किया जाता है। ऐसी व्यापक भाषा ही राष्ट्रभाषा कहलाती है। भारतवर्ष में अनेक भाषाएँ बोली जाती हैं। भारतवर्ष को यदि भाषाओं का अजायबघर भी कहा जाए तो अतिशयोक्ति न होगी लेकिन एक संपर्क भाषा के बिना आज पूरे राष्ट्र का काम नहीं चल सकता।

सन 1947 में भारतवर्ष को स्वतंत्रता प्राप्त हुई। जब तक भारत में अंग्रेज़ शासक रहे, तब तक अंग्रेज़ी का बोलबाला था किंतु अंग्रेज़ों के जाने के बाद यह असंभव था की देश के सारे कार्य अंग्रेजी में हो। जब देश के सविधान का निर्माण किआ गया तो यह प्रशन भी उपस्थित हुआ कि राष्ट्र की भाषा कौन-सी होगी ? क्योंकि राष्ट्रभाषा के बिना राष्ट्र के स्वतंत्र अस्तित्व की पहचान नहीं होगी। कुछ लोग अंग्रेज़ी भाषा को ही राष्ट्रभाषा बनाए रखने के पक्ष में थे परंतु अंग्रेज़ी को राष्ट्रभाषा इसलिए घोषित नहीं किया जा सकता था क्योंकि देश में बहुत कम लोग ऐसे थे जो अंग्रेज़ी बोल सकते थे। दूसरे, उनकी भाषा को यहाँ बनाए रखने का तात्पर्य यह था कि हम किसी-न-किसी रूप में उनकी दासता में फंसे रहें।

हिंदी को राष्ट्रभाषा  घोषित करने का प्रमुख तर्क यह है की हिंदी एक भारतीय भाषा है। दूसरे, जितनी संख्या यहां हिंदी बोलने वाले लोगों की थीं, उतनी किसी अन्य प्रांतीय भाषा बोलने वालों की नहीं। तीसरे, हिंदी समझना बहुत आसान है। देश के प्रत्येक अंचल में हिंदी सरलता से समझी जाती है, भले ही इसे बोल न सके। चौथी बात यह है कि हिंदी भाषा अन्य भारतीय भाषाओं की तुलना में सरल है, इसमें शब्दों का प्रयोग तकपूर्ण है। यह भाषा दो-तीन महीनों के अल्प समय में ही सीखी जा सकती है। इन सभी विशेषताओं के कारण भारतीय संविधान सभा ने यह निश्चय किया कि हिंदी को भारत की राष्ट्रभाषा तथा देवनागरी लिपि को राष्ट्रलिपि बनाया जाए।

हिंदी को राष्ट्रभाषा घोषित करने के बाद उसका एकदम प्रयोग करना कठिन था। अत: राजकीय कर्मचारियों को यह सुविधा दी गई थी कि सन 1965 तक केद्रीय शासन का कार्य व्यावहारिक रूप से अंग्रेज़ी में चलता रहे और पंद्रह वर्षों में हिंदी को पूर्ण – समृद्धिशाली बनाने के लिए प्रयत्न किए जाएँ। इस बीच सरकारी कर्मचारी भी हिंदी सीख लें। कर्मचारियों को हिंदी पढ़ने की विशेष सुविधाएँ दी गई। शिक्षा में हिंदी को अनिवार्य विषय बना दिया गया। शिक्षा मंत्रालय की ओर से हिंदी के पारिभाषिक शब्द-निर्माण का कार्य प्रारंभ हुआ तथा इसी प्रकार की अन्य सुविधाएँ हिंदी को दी गई ताकि हिंदी, अंग्रेज़ी का स्थान पूर्ण रूप से ग्रहण कर ले। अनेक भाषा-विशेषज्ञों की राय में यदि भारतीय भाषाओं की लिपि को देवनागरी स्वीकार कर लिया जाए तो राष्ट्रीय भावात्मक एकता स्थापित करने में सुविधा होगी। सभी भारतीय एक-दूसरे की भाषा में रचे हुए साहित्य का रसास्वादन कर सकेंगे!/

आज जहाँ शासन और जनता हिंदी को आगे बढ़ाने और उसका विकास करने के लिए प्रयत्नशील हैं वहाँ ऐसे लोगों की भी कमी नहीं है जो उसकी टाँग पकड़कर पीछे घसीटने का प्रयत्न कर रहे हैं। इन लोगों में कुछ ऐसे भी हैं जो हिंदी को संविधान के अनुसार सरकारी भाषा बनाने से तो सहमत हैं किंतु उसे राष्ट्रभाषा के रूप में स्वीकार नहीं करना चाहते। कुछ ऐसे भी हैं जो उर्दू का निर्मूल पक्ष में समर्थन करके राज्य-कार्य में विध्न डालते रहते हैं। धीरे-धीरे पंजाब, बंगाल और चेन्नई के निवासी भी प्रांतीयता की संकीर्णता में फंसकर अपनी-अपनी भाषाओं की मांग कर रहे हैं परंतु हिंदी ही एक ऐसी भाषा है जिसके द्वारो संपूर्ण भारत को एक सूत्र में पिरोया जा सकता है।

नि:संदेह हिंदी एक ऐसी भाषा है जिसमें राष्ट्रभाषा बनने की पूर्ण क्षमता है। इसका समृद्ध साहित्य और इसके प्रतिभा संपन्न साहित्यकार इसे समूचे देश की संपर्क भाषा का दर्जा देते हैं किंतु आज हमारे सामने सबसे बड़ा प्रश्न यह है कि हिंदी का प्रचार-प्रसार कैसे किया जाए ? सर्वप्रथम तो हिंदी भाषा को रोज़गार से जोड़ा जाए। हिंदी सीखने वालों को सरकारी नौकरियों में प्राथमिकता दी जाए। सरकारी कायलियों तथा न्यायालयों में केवल हिंदी भाषा का ही प्रयोग होना चाहिए। अहिंदी भाषी क्षेत्रों में हिंदी का अधिकाधिक प्रचार होना चाहिए। वहाँ हिंदी की पत्र-पत्रिकाओं के प्रकाशकों एवं संपादकों को और आर्थिक अनुदान दिया जाए।

उपसंहार- आज हिंदी के प्रचार-प्रसार में कुछ बाधाएँ अवश्य हैं किंतु दूसरी ओर केद्रीय सरकार, राज्य सरकारें एवं जनता सभी एकजुट होकर हिंदी के विकास के लिए प्रयत्नशील हैं। सरकार द्वारा अनेक योजनाएँ बनाई गई हैं। उत्तर भारत में अधिकांश राज्यों में सरकारी कामकाज हिंदी में किया जा रहा है। राष्ट्रीयकृत बैंकों ने भी हिंदी में कार्य करना आरंभ कर दिया है। विभिन्न संस्थाओं एवं अकादमियों द्वारा हिंदी लेखकों की श्रेष्ठ पुस्तकों को पुरुस्कृत किआ जा रहा है। दूरदर्शन और आकाशवाणी द्वारा भी इस दिशा में काफी प्रयास किए जा रहे है।

# rashtra bhasha hindi essay # rastrabhasa hindi par nibandh # Short Essay on National Language in Hindi

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ध्यान दें – प्रिय दर्शकों Essay on National Language in Hindi आपको अच्छा लगा तो जरूर शेयर करे ।

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The House passed a TikTok ban bill. But is the app really a national security threat?

Bobby Allyn

Devotees of TikTok gather at the Capitol in Washington, as the House passed a bill that would lead to a nationwide ban of the popular video app if its China-based owner doesn't sell. J. Scott Applewhite/AP hide caption

Devotees of TikTok gather at the Capitol in Washington, as the House passed a bill that would lead to a nationwide ban of the popular video app if its China-based owner doesn't sell.

The House of Representatives passed legislation on Wednesday giving TikTok two choices: find a buyer for the immensely popular video app, or face a nationwide ban in the U.S.

President Biden has indicated he would sign the law, but first it must clear the Senate, where it faces an uncertain future. Several other anti-TikTok efforts in the Senate have stalled, and it is too soon to tell whether the House's legislation will meet a different fate.

Why the House voted to ban TikTok and what could come next

Whatever happens with this measure, it marks the first time a chamber of Congress has passed a bill that could shut down a social media platform, a move that civil liberties advocates say tramples on the free speech rights of millions of American users.

TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based tech giant ByteDance, views the House legislation as an existential threat but not a novel attack, since the social media app has fended off numerous other attempts to put it out of business.

So what is different this time?

Here's a breakdown of what you need to know.

What exactly does the House bill do?

The bill gives ByteDance six months to find a buyer for TikTok.

If the company cannot sell the app in that time, it will become illegal for app stores and web-hosting companies to offer TikTok, as long as it remains under the control of a "foreign adversary."

That, in turn, would force Apple and Google to remove TikTok from app stores. It would also require internet service providers to make TikTok inaccessible on internet browsers in the U.S.

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There is no way to make TikTok disappear for the 170 million Americans who have already downloaded it. But removing TikTok from app stores would mean that users would not be able to download any further software updates. And experts say without the ability to update regularly, the app would become slow, glitchy, buggy and rife with other problems to the point where using it at all would be just about impossible.

In other words, TikTok would die a slow, gradual death, rather than a swift demise.

What will the House bill mean for TikTok users?

In the short term, users will likely not notice any changes. The app will work as it always does for the millions of Americans who enjoy it.

And even if the Senate passes a companion bill, and Biden signs it into law, there is a six-month deadline to sell, which could be prolonged by court challenges.

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In the event that TikTok does become illegal in the U.S., it would be tricky to access the app, but there will be workarounds.

People could turn to virtual private networks, or VPNs, to shield their location and get past restrictions. The technique is popular in places like Russia and China, where governments have prohibited many popular internet apps and services.

Who could buy TikTok if ByteDance is forced to sell?

Very few companies.

As one of the most popular social media apps in the world, ByteDance would sell TikTok at a hefty price. TikTok is likely worth tens of billions of dollars, an amount only the biggest tech companies — like Google, Meta, Microsoft or Amazon — could afford.

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But the prospect of TikTok being acquired by a Big Tech firm raises instant antitrust concerns, since the Biden administration has taken a tough stance against tech industry mergers that serve to inflate the size and influence of already massive companies.

What's more, TikTok's sale would require the approval of China, which has said it would strongly oppose the forced sale of its first-ever global sensation of an app.

As the Senate considers a companion bill, it is possible that lawmakers in Washington would use the House bill as leverage to try to force TikTok to find a non-Chinese buyer, but talks over selling the app have been going on without a resolution for years.

What is the case that TikTok poses a national security risk?

Many in Washington, including lawmakers from both parties and top intelligence officials, fear the Chinese government could use TikTok to spy on Americans, push pro-China propaganda, or use the service to interfere in U.S. elections.

To date, lawmakers have not offered any evidence of the Chinese Communist Party using TikTok as a weapon against American interests.

Some critics of the bill say it is misguided if the goal is keeping Americans' data out of the hands of the Chinese government.

"The same kind of data that are collected by TikTok can easily be obtained by anyone who wants them by data aggregators and data brokers," said Jameel Jaffer , executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

"The ban will be ineffective because China can access the same kind of information about Americans without TikTok," he said.

But have there been developments that have troubled officials in Washington?

ByteDance admitted in 2022 that former employees — but not government officials — had surveilled Americans on TikTok, including several journalists who were writing critical stories about the company.

And last year, a former ByteDance executive said in a court filing that the Chinese government has in the past been granted a "superuser" credential on TikTok, and that it was used to spy on Hong Kong protesters in 2018, something the company denies.

While neither incident shows that the Chinese government has used TikTok for espionage or disinformation campaigns on U.S. users, the developments have fueled a growing worry that Beijing could order that the app's algorithm be manipulated to shape what millions of American users see when they scroll.

What has TikTok said in response?

TikTok has long claimed it has never received an inquiry for Americans' data from Chinese authorities, saying it would deny any such request.

The company has also touted an initiative dubbed "Project Texas," saying that all U.S. user data has been transferred to servers controlled by Austin-based software company Oracle. TikTok also says Americans' data is now being monitored by third-party auditors in the U.S.

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The plan, essentially a data firewall, was intended to ensure that Chinese officials cannot access Americans' personal information.

But under Chinese law, companies still have to turn over personal user data once it is sought by government officials.

This is why national security officials in Washington, who have been investigating TikTok's ties to Beijing for five years, have not approved the plan.

There is a consensus in the White House that any move TikTok takes short of complete divestiture from China is unacceptable.

If the House bill eventually becomes law, won't there be a legal challenge?

It is all but certain that TikTok will try to have a ban overturned in the courts.

Legal experts say shutting down a social media platform in the name of national security is something that can only be accomplished if the security threat is overwhelming.

Otherwise, it will likely be considered an infringement of the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans, if the government cannot show that the speech constraint is justified.

"Restricting Americans' right to access information or ideas on a media platform from abroad implicates the First Amendment. There's really no dispute about that," said Jaffer with the Knight First Amendment Institute

Previous attempts to shutter TikTok in the U.S. have not been successful.

Three separate federal district judges have blocked efforts to ban TikTok — two courts during the Trump administration, and one U.S. court more recently in Montana.

Judge Wendy Beetlestone found in 2020 that TikTok's national security threat is "phrased in the hypothetical."

In late 2023, judge Donald Molloy said that a crusade by officials in Montana to block TikTok within the state's borders had a "pervasive undertone of anti-Chinese sentiment."

Many constitutional scholars say banning TikTok requires clearing nearly insurmountable legal hurdles.

What evidence does the government have against TikTok?

If officials in Washington declassify national security information about TikTok, that could change the public's understanding of the app's threat.

Yet some lawmakers are already questioning the basis for targeting TikTok.

A handful of members of Congress who left a closed-door briefing about TikTok with top national security officials in the Biden administration a day before the House vote said officials did not back up the notion that TikTok is dangerous with any new information.

"Not a single thing we heard in today's classified briefing was specific to TikTok," Sara Jacobs, a Democratic from California told the Associated Press. "These are things that are happening on all social media platforms."

If the bill eventually becomes law and ends up in court, the government will have to demonstrate on what basis it is making a national security case against TikTok, Jaffer said.

"You can't restrict Americans' constitutional rights on the basis of secrets," he said.