Census 2011 language data
Also called: Mother tongues · Topic: Population of India: Distribution, Density, Growth and Composition · NCERT: Beyond NCERT
Meaning
In Census 2011, people gave the name of their mother tongue, the language they first learned at home. The Census collected 19,569 different raw answers. Experts then grouped these into 121 languages: 22 scheduled and 99 non-scheduled. Hindi was the mother tongue of 43.6% of people, Bengali of 8.0% and Marathi of 6.9%. The 22 scheduled languages together cover about 97% of Indians.
Example
Many people in Bihar report Bhojpuri or Magahi as their mother tongue. The Census groups these under Hindi, which is one reason Hindi's share is so large.
Don't confuse with
- Linguistic Survey of India: this was George Grierson's survey (1903-1928), which recorded 179 languages and 544 dialects. Census language data is gathered from people's own answers in each census.
Related concepts
- Linguistic Survey of India
- Scheduled languages
- Language families of India
- Indo-European language family
- Dravidian language family
- Austric language family
- Sino-Tibetan language family
- Classical language