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Hindi was the fastest growing language in India at 25.19 percent, adding close to a 100 million speakers between 2001-2011.
Kashmiri (22.97 percent), Gujarati (20.4 percent), Manipuri (20.07 percent), and Bengali (16.63 percent) are the second, third, fourth and fifth fastest growing languages, respectively, according to new census data.
Hindi (520 million speakers) and Bengali (97 million speakers) remain the most-spoken and the second-most-spoken languages across the country.
Sanskrit remains the least spoken among the scheduled languages – officially recognised – with 24,821 speakers despite an increase of 76 percent from 2001.
Two scheduled languages have witnessed a drop in the number of people referring to them as their mother tongues: Urdu declined by 1.58 percent and Konkani by 9.54 percent.
Of the 99 unscheduled languages, Bhili/Bhilodi continue to have the most speakers (104 million marked it as their mother tongue), up from 95 million in 2001.
Gondi retained its second position with 29 million speakers, up from 27 million in 2001.
Bhili/Bhilodi is predominantly spoken by the Bhil people who are native to Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.
Gondi is spoken by the Gonds who primarily inhabit Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra, Bihar and Karnataka.
Tamil (-5 percent) and Malayalam (-10 percent) speaking populations are falling across most states in north India even as Tamil Nadu and Kerala saw over 33 percent increase in the number of Hindi, Bengali, Assamese and Odia speakers, indicating a reverse migration trend from earlier decades when people from the two southern states migrated in large numbers to the north, The Times of India reported on 28 June 2018.
“Similarly, people living in border areas are given only one option to select as their native language even if they have more than one,” he added.
Marathi with 83 million speakers displaced Telugu (81 million) to become the third-most-common mother tongue after Hindi and Bengali.
Gujarati, which was ranked seventh in 2001 with 46 million speakers, moved ahead of Urdu to occupy the sixth spot with 55 million speakers in 2011.
Urdu dropped from the sixth place in 2001 (51 million speakers) to the seventh place in 2011 with 50 million people mentioning it as their mother tongue.
Kannada was constant at eighth place with the number of speakers increasing from 37 to 43 million.
Konkani speakers in Karnataka and Kerala might put Kannada/Malayalam as their mother tongue as opposed to Konkani, which could explain the drop in the number of Konkani speakers, Devy said.
The increase in Manipuri speakers, Devy added, could be attributed to international immigration — foreigners settling down in Manipur and learning Manipuri in the hope of getting an Indian passport.
The number of Gujarati speakers might have been over-reported owing to the electoral scam in 2007 wherein a large number of fake voter identification cards were reported, Devy said.
“A better way to determine the presence of a language is to look at the number of websites on the internet in that language.”
(Sravan Pallapothu, an MSc Student from the Symbiosis School of Economics, is an intern with IndiaSpend.)
(This article was first published on IndiaSpend and has been republished with permission.)
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