How many languages are spoken in India?
Well, the answer depends on your source. The database Ethnologue in its 2005 edition lists 428 languages for India, 415 of which are “living” (Gordon 2005). On the other hand, the government’s 1991 census lists 114 languages; but the same census also lists 1579 “mother tongues” (GOI 2002). Further, these one-and-a-half thousand mother tongues have been “rationalized” from a list of around 10 thousand mother tongues which the surveyed population returned! This kind of rationalization is necessary because the same language often has different names in different places. Besides, mother tongues are often mixed up with region, religion, caste names, ethnic identities, etc. Other oddities also exist: one researcher reports that some censuses returned mother tongues spoken only by men, and others only by women (Groff 2003)! Clearly, some kind of order is needed. In any case, the country is multilingual in many fields. Of the 114 languages listed, 87 were used in the mass media, 71 in radio br
