Languages of India
From Freepedia
- The article describes the languages spoken in the Republic of India. For information on languages spoken by the native peoples of North America, see Native American languages.
India is rich in languages, boasting not only the indigenous sprouting of Dravidian and Indo-Aryan tongues, but of the absorption of Middle-Eastern and European influences as well. Distinct, often ancient, and rich literary traditions are to be found in several languages, among them Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Telugu, and Urdu, and not to mention two Classical languages of the world Tamil and Sanskrit
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The languages of India
While eighteen major languages are recognized as "National Languages" by the Constitution of India, Hindi, in the Devanagari script, is the official language of the federal government of India. Hindi is the mother tongue of 18% of the people, though it is said to be spoken well by about 30% of the population and understood sufficiently by perhaps an even greater number. While English, due to India's colonial past, is safely embedded in educated Indian circles and enjoys associate official status in the government system, it is not largely spoken by the vast preponderance of the country. It is worth mentioning in this context that in the 1991 census, over 90 million people (about 11% of those polled) claimed that English was their first, second or third language.
Individual states, whose borders are mostly drawn on socio-linguistic lines, are free to decide their own language for internal administration and education, so there are 22 official languages spoken throughout the country. Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri and Sindhi, are among the official languages which are widely spoken.
Urdu is the official language of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir while Bangla or Bengali is the official language of West Bengal, Tripura (and the neighboring nation of Bangladesh). Linguistically, Hindi and Urdu are the same language (often referred to as Hindustani), the difference being that Hindi is written in the Devanagari script and derives much of its vocabulary from Sanskrit and Prakrit, while Urdu is written in the Arabic script and derives much of its superior vocabulary from the Persian and Arabic languages.
Sanskrit and Tamil are the classical languages of India. Telugu (తెలుగు), also known as 'Italian of the East', is another language with a notably ancient history and body of literature, and is widely used in Carnatic music. Though an official language, and the main language of Hindu liturgy, Sanskrit is no longer a living language. It is mainly used in rituals and ceremonies or as part of daily prayers in Hinduism. Tamil is spoken by 74 million people around the world, most of them in South India and Northern Sri Lanka. Tamil is also one of the National Languages of Singapore and Malaysia.
In all, there are 24 languages which are spoken by a million or more people, in addition to thousands of smaller languages. Besides the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, there are many Tibeto-Burman and Austro-Asiatic languages spoken in India, among others. The Andamanese languages, spoken on the Andaman Islands, are apparently not related to any other language family.
Alphabets of Indian languages
Indian languages have corresponding distinct alphabets. The two major families are those of the Dravidian languages and those of the Indo-Aryan languages, the former largely confined to the south and the latter to the north. With the exception of Urdu the alphabets of all these languages are native to India. There are those scholars who believe the scripts of the Northern languages (like Sanskrit, Bengali, Hindi and Punjabi) to be distant derivations of the Aramaic alphabet, though this is a disputed theory primarily because the number and grouping of sounds and letters are so radically different.
Phonetic alphabet
A remarkable feature of the alphabets of India is the manner in which they are organised. It is organised according to phonetic principle, unlike the Roman alphabet, which has a random sequence of letters.
The classification is as follows
| unvoiced consonants | voiced consonants | nasals | unaspirated | aspirated | unaspirated | aspirated |
| velar plosives | k | kh | g | gh | ng |
| palatal affricates | ch | chh | j | jh | ny |
| retroflex plosives | t | th | d | dh | nn |
| dental plosives | t | th | d | dh | n |
| bilabial plosives | p | ph | b | bh | m |
| glides and approximants | y | r | l | w |
| fricatives | sh | sh | s | h |
This classification is observed in all the languages under discussion. Additionally each language has a few special letters signifying sounds specific to that language, as also a few symbols representing composite sounds.
Finally, the list of vowels is separately specified, as follows
- a, aa, i, ii, u, uu, e, ai, o, au, um, (a)h
Additionally in Vedic Sanskrit: rr, rrr, lrr, lrrr
Note that the list read as pairs represents shorter and longer versions of same vowel. Here the first a is like u in bus. (a)h is special to Sanskritised words, occurring in word endings as in duhkh(a)h, meaning pain or suffering. It is impossible to say any of the consonants without the associated vowel and the default way of saying a consonant attaches the neutral a sound to it.
In languages of Eastern India like Bangla, Oriya and Assamese, a is spoken almost o.
The classification of these sounds is universal. Every language in India has a corresponding symbol, and also, with some modifications, the corresponding sound. In fact we may be tempted to think that all languages at least of the Indo-European family have the corresponding alphabets, give or take a few, and sometimes give or take a row or column.
For instance, English has morphemes similar to the t, th, d, and dh of the third row, but they manifest as only two phonemes, t and d. In French on the other hand, the third row is absent, but morphemes similar t and d of the fourth row are used.
For nasals, Sanskrit imposes considerable systematics. The above scheme records that the nasal occurring in conjunction with any given row has a sound characteristic that row. For instance the nasalisation occurring in the word "Ganga" is that of the first row, while the nasalisation occurring in the words "India" or "integral" are character- istically front palatals. Speakers of any language have to necessarily speak in this manner though they never realise it.
The classification of the "vowel generated" may seem rather curious. The belief here is that y sound arises from conjunction of ii with a, w sound arises from trying to say u (as in put) or uu in conjunction with a. Old Sanskrit of the Hindu Rig Veda has two more vowels, rr and lrr, as also their corresponding longer versions. It is likely that the rr was guttural like the French r, more akin to a vowel than a consonant. The lrr remains a mystery for being classified a vowel. But this classification then explains r (as in run) and l (as in long) simply as conjunction of these vowels with the a sound.
The economy of this classification in the fact that effectively each of the five main rows is generated by one letter, the others are systmeatic modifications of the same. In Tamil, a great simplification of alphabet has been achieved by having only one symbol for each of the five consonants, the specific hardening and aspiration understood from context while reading. Tamil script indeed spells kathai (story) and gadhai (weapon of Bhima) the same.
Phonetic classification in Tamil
Tamil language drastically differs in phonetics from other Indian languages. There are many distintinctive sounds unique to Tamil language. Tamil consonants are classified into three categories with 6 alphabets each:
Hard - k ch t th p R (plosives mentioned in the above table with addition to "R")
Nasal - ng ny nn n m N (Nasals mentioned in the above table with additional "N")
Mid - y r l v zh L (glides and approximants mentioned in the above table with 2 additional "L" and "zh")
Vowels - a, aa, i, ii, u, uu, e, ee, ai, o, oo, au, akh
Note that um and uh is not in Tamil and e, o and akh are unique to Tamil. The 2 short vowels e and o are not in Sanskrit and almost all other Indian languages.
It should also be noted one of the young Indian Language Malayalam is a perfect blend of 2 classifical languages - Tamil and Sanskrit. It combines all the phonetics in Tamil and Sanskrit.
Urdu alphabet
Urdu is unique among Indian languages. It is derived from Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and some Sanksrit. Most of Urdu's grammar, however, is 'genetically' linked to that of older Prakrits. Much of Urdu's vocabulary derives its sources from Persian and Arabic. The word Urdu, in Turkish, means "camp", "tent", or "military encampment". Presumably these cantonments were where Mughal armies, mostly Muslim speakers of Persian (and hence intimately aware of Arabic), and natives interacted, soon forming a new mixed language. For this reason, the Persian script, in turn derived from Arabic script, was adopted and molded to fit with the Indian sound-system. For this reason, while the Urdu language itself has only six additional letters with unique sounds different from that of Hindi, its script has no connection to native Indian alphabets.
List of Indian Languages
There are a large number of languages in India; 216 of them are spoken by a group of 10,000 persons or more.
See also
External links
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