How many languages are spoken in India? 22, 121 or 19,569.

Why there are three answers

The difference between language and dialect explains much of the problem: the census groups many varieties under one name, and the criterion is not always linguistic. An independent study, the People's Linguistic Survey of India (2010 to 2012), identified 780 languages without distinguishing language from dialect.

So none of the three answers is wrong: each answers a different question, that of legal recognition, that of statistical classification and that of the speech actually used in each home.

The Constitution does not define a national language. Hindi, in the Devanagari script, is the official language of the Union (Article 343), English remains in official use alongside it, and the states define their own official languages.

The ten most spoken

In millions of mother-tongue speakers, according to the 2011 census:

One caution when reading the table: the Hindi figure includes dozens of varieties that the census groups under that name, such as Bhojpuri and Rajasthani. Without that grouping, Hindi proper appears with about 322 million speakers (26.6%).

Bengali and Odia in numbers

Bengali is the second most spoken language in India, with 97.2 million mother-tongue speakers, 8.03% of the country, concentrated in West Bengal, Tripura and parts of Assam. In Bangladesh, it is the language of about 98.8% of the inhabitants, according to the CIA World Factbook estimate for 2011. Worldwide, estimates of native speakers vary by source and exceed 230 million, according to surveys based on Ethnologue. The first words are in the language guide.

Odia, the language of Odisha, had 37.5 million speakers in 2011, 3.1% of the country's population. Odisha, with 42 million inhabitants, was 2.77% Christian in the 2011 census, a minority for whom pastor training material needs to be in the local language.

Both are the basis of this project's work: the theology course was translated first into Bengali, and will then go into Odia and Hindi.

Different languages, different scripts

The diversity is not only in the sounds. Hindi is written in Devanagari, Bengali has its own alphabet and so does Odia. Anyone who opens the language guide sees three distinct scripts side by side, and this matters in translation: a course in Bengali cannot simply be reused for Odia or Hindi, because each language needs its own narration, subtitles and materials.

It also helps to remember that the 22 languages of the Eighth Schedule cover the great majority of the population: according to the census, 96.7% of Indians have one of them as their mother tongue. The other 99 languages, spoken by fewer people, include languages of tribal peoples, such as Bhili, Gondi, Khasi and Garo.

What language diversity changes in practice

• For the traveler. On a trip through India, the language of the signs changes from state to state, because the states define their own official languages. The language guide offers greetings in Hindi, Bengali and Odia.
• For the church. The Bible and theology courses need to exist in the language of the heart. That is what William Carey and his colleagues did when they translated the Bible, in whole or in part, into dozens of Indian languages. See also how many Christians there are in India and where they live.
• For the census. According to The India Forum's analysis, when a variety is grouped under another language, it stops appearing in the statistics. That is why what enters the count matters.

For more facts about the country, see nine facts few people know about India and the geography and climate page. For the country's religions, see what is the religion of India.