Legislation

Miscellaneous: Maps

Shortly after gaining independence, the Indian government created states based on linguistic boundaries. Each state has a majority language, which takes precedence over the many others existing in the region. The official language is not always the majority language of the state; for example, many of the northeastern states use English for this purpose. Others, such as Gujarat, use Hindi as their official language. Map above shows the majority languages of each state shaded according to the language family to which they belong. It is important to remember that this map very much simplifies the distribution of languages in India; nonetheless, these languages play the biggest role in language policy in India. One major language, Urdu, does not appear on the map. Though it is spoken by more than 35 million people, it does not constitute a majority in any state. Urdu actually presents a special situation because it is mutually intelligible with Hindi. The two are basically literary variants of the same spoken language. Urdu has a more Persianized vocabulary and uses the Arabic script, while Hindi has a more Sankritized vocabulary and is written in Deva Nagari script.

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