By IPS Correspondents
NEW DELHI, Dec 31 1996 (IPS)

That Indians speak in a medley of tongues was long known, but the full picture of the country’s linguistic mosaic has been uncovered for the first time now.

There are 325 main languages in the country, shows a mammoth survey called ‘The Peoples of India Project’ which quizzed 4,536 communities across the country over an eight-year period. However, the more than 900 million Indians converse in a total of 1,652 tongues, including foreign ones. The survey was carried out by the Anthropologial Survey of India.

Project Editor, K.S. Singh found the linguistic diversity revealed by the responses to the standard question: ‘Which language do you speak?’, “overwhelming”.

People in India speak Armenian, Persian and Chinese, among other foreign languages. Two communities speak Hebrew. Another group of people in southwestern Maharashtra state speaks a language which was used as a code by spies of the legendary medieval Maratha warrior chieftain Shivaji.

The languages are broadly divided geographically into the Indo- Aryan which are found in the northern half of the subcontinent and the Dravidian, which are predominant in peninsular India.

Surprisingly, Indians speaking different tongues can still understand each other. This is because the majority of people in the country speak at least two languages.

“If such (linguistic) diversity does not affect communication it is because 67 percent of Indians are bilingual,” says Singh. The survey found that more and more people in the country are able to speak in more than one tongue.

Three decades ago, less than a tenth of the people could speak more than one language.

According to the survey, besides the 325 main languages in the country, another 96 are used only for intra-group communication by people with different mother tongues.

“One of the most important characteristics of Indian languages is that they show striking similarities in their phonology, grammar and lexicon, irrespective of the language families they belong to,” says Singh.

An interesting example of how languages have evolved to bridge the communication divide in multilingual India, is that of Nefamese used in the mainly tribal northeastern region of country.

Perhaps the youngest tongue, this is a mix of languages spoken in northeastern India and was born when the seven states in the remote region joined the national mainstream.

Nefamese became the language of trade and commerce binding all the northeastern states of India. But it is used only for communication between the different tribal communities which have not given up their own language while learning Nefamese.

Some languages have strayed far from their birthplace to distant parts of the country, travelling with entrepreneurs seeking fortunes away from home. One of the best known examples of this is that of the Marwaris, a traditional business community in western India.

Said to be India’s most astute entrepreneurs, Marwaris have taken not only their wares all over the country, but their language too. It is spoken in 22 states, making it the most widespread tongue in the country.

Another language with a wide geographic spread is Urdu which grew up during medieval times as a mix of Hindi, native to north India, and Persian, brought by the Islamic Mughal invaders who came from Central Asia. Urdu, however, is less and less a tongue of daily conversation and is better known as the language of refined discourse in north India.

Though the spread of Urdu was not directly linked to that of Islam, the popularity of English in parts of India is the result of the influence of Christian missionaries. This is specially true in northeast India where English is common as the second language.

Gujarati, the language of the western coastal state of that name, is also now spoken in many other parts of the country.

Among the Dravidian languages, Telugu, the mother tongue in the largest southern state of Andhra Pradesh, is the most popular, being now spoken in 13 states across the country.

The survey found a resurgence of the original Aryan language Sanskrit, which was once considered almost extinct as a spoken language. Some 6,000 people said it was their mother tongue.

Most Sanskrit speakers are in Bihar (1,745) and Uttar Pradesh (1,166). Besides these northern states, Sanskrit is also spoken by 32 households in southern Karnataka state and another 599 people in Maharashtra.

This does not take into account the common use of Sanskrit by Hindu priests during religious ceremonies throughout the country.

The survey has counted languages which were not recorded by the national census held once every 10 years. The latest of these in 1991, did not register those languages which were spoken by communities with a population of less than 10,000. Not even the names of the communities were recorded.

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