Indian English | |
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Native to | Republic of India |
Region | South Asia |
Native speakers | ~260,000 first language, or native, speakers. (2011 Census of India)[1][2][3] ~83 million Second language speakers) ~46 million third language speakers |
Indo-European
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Latin, rarely in local scripts[4] | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | eng |
Glottolog | indi1255 [5] |
IETF | en-IN |
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Indian English refers to the regional variety of the English language spoken in the Republic of India. South indian hindi movie 3gp mp4 download. The Constitution of India has mandated Hindi in the Devanagari script to be the official language of the Union; English is an additional official language for government work along with Hindi.[6]
After independence from British rule in 1947, English remained an official language of the new Dominion of India, and later, the Republic of India. Only a few hundred thousand Indians, or less than 0.1% of the total population, have English as their first language.[7][8][9][10]
According to the 2001 Census, 12.6% of Indians knew English.[11][not in citation given] An analysis of the 2001 Census of India[12] concluded that approximately 86 million Indians reported English as their second language, and another 39 million reported it as their third language. No data was available whether these individuals were English speakers or users.[clarification needed]
According to the 2005 India Human Development Survey,[13] of the 41,554 surveyed, households reported that 72% of men (29,918) did not speak any English, 28% (11,635) spoke at least some English, and 5% (2,077, roughly 17.9% of those who spoke at least some English) spoke fluent English. Among women, the corresponding percentages were 83% (34,489) speaking no English, 17% (7,064) speaking at least some English, and 3% (1,246, roughly 17.6% of those who spoke at least some English) speaking English fluently.[14] According to statistics of District Information System for Education (DISE) of National University of Educational Planning and Administration under Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, enrollment in English-medium schools increased by 50% between 2008–09 and 2013–14. The number of English-medium school students in India increased from over 15 million in 2008–09 to 29 million by 2013–14.[15]
According to the 2011 Census, 129 million (10.6%) Indians spoke English. 259,678 (0.02%) Indians spoke English as their first language.[16]. It concluded that approximately 83 million Indians (6.8%) reported English as their second language, and 46 million (3.8%) reported it as their third language, making English the second-most spoken language in India.[17] No data was available whether these individuals were English speakers or users.[clarification needed]
India ranks 22 out of 72 countries in the 2016 EF English Proficiency Index published by the EF Education First. The index gives the country a score of 57.30 indicating 'moderate proficiency'. India ranks 4th out of 19 Asian countries included in the index.[18] Among Asian countries, Singapore (63.52), Malaysia (60.70) and the Philippines (60.33) received higher scores than India.
English, according to the Indian Constitution, is the language of the Supreme Court and all the High Courts of India.[19] However, in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan there is use of Hindi in courts because of Presidential approval.[20] In 2018, the Punjab and Haryana High Court also await Presidential approval for Hindi use as well.[21]
Indian English generally uses the Indian numbering system. Idiomatic forms derived from Indian literary languages and vernaculars have been absorbed into Indian English. Nevertheless, there remains general homogeneity in phonetics, vocabulary, and phraseology between various dialects of Indian English.[22][23][24][25]
English language public instruction began in India in the 1830s during the rule of the East India Company (India was then, and is today, one of the most linguistically diverse regions of the world[26]). In 1835, English replacedPersian as the official language of the Company. Lord Macaulay played a major role in introducing English and western concepts to education in India. He supported the replacement of Persian by English as the official language, the use of English as the medium of instruction in all schools, and the training of English-speaking Indians as teachers.[27] Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, primary, middle, and high-schools were opened in many districts of British India, with most high-schools offering English language instruction in some subjects. In 1857, just before the end of Company rule, universities modelled on the University of London and using English as the medium of instruction were established in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. During the British Raj, lasting from 1858 to 1947, English language penetration increased throughout India. This was driven in part by the gradually increasing hiring of Indians in the civil services. At the time of India's independence in 1947, English was the only functional lingua franca in the country.
After Indian Independence in 1947, Hindi was declared the first official language, and attempts were made to declare Hindi the sole national language of India. Due to protests from Tamil Nadu and other non-Hindi-speaking states, it was decided to temporarily retain English for official purposes until at least 1965. By the end of this period, however, opposition from non-Hindi states was still too strong to have Hindi declared the sole language. With this in mind, the English Language Amendment Bill declared English to be an associate language 'until such time as all non-Hindi States had agreed to its being dropped.'[citation needed] This has not yet occurred, and it is still widely used. For instance, it is the only reliable means of day-to-day communication between the central government and the non-Hindi states.
The view of the English language among many Indians has gone from associating it with colonialism to associating it with economic progress, and English continues to be an official language of India.[28]
While there is an assumption that English is readily available in India, available studies show that its usage is actually restricted to the elite,[29] because of inadequate education to large parts of the Indian population. The use of outdated teaching methods and the poor grasp of English exhibited by the authors of many guidebooks disadvantage students who rely on these books, giving India a moderate proficiency in English.[30]
The term, 'Hinglish', is a portmanteau of the languages English and Hindi. This typically refers to the macaronic hybrid use of Hindi and English. It is often the growing preferred language of the urban and semi-urban educated Indian youth, as well as the Indian diaspora abroad.[31] The Hindi film industry, more popularly known as Bollywood, incorporates considerable amounts of Hinglish as well.[32] Many internet platforms and voice commands on Google also recognize Hinglish.[31]
Other macaronic hybrids such as Manglish (Malayalam and English), Kanglish (Kannada and English), Tenglish (Telugu and English), and Tanglish or Tamglish (Tamil and English) exist in South India.
An example of a North Indian woman with an Indian accent (Vandana Shiva) | |
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In general, Indian English has fewer peculiarities in its vowel sounds than the consonants, especially as spoken by native speakers of languages like Hindi, the vowel phoneme system having some similarities with that of English. Among the distinctive features of the vowel-sounds employed by some Indian English speakers:
The following are the variations in Indian English resulting from inability to articulate few vowels
The following are the characteristics of dialect of Indian English most similar to RP:
The following are the variations in Indian English:
The following are the variations in Indian English that are often discouraged:
A number of distinctive features of Indian English are due to 'the vagaries of English spelling'.[39] Most Indian languages, unlike English, have a nearly phonetic spelling, so the spelling of a word is a highly reliable guide to its modern pronunciation. Indians' tendency to pronounce English phonetically as well can cause divergence from Western English. This phenomenon is known as spelling pronunciation.
English is a stress-timed language. Both syllable stress and word stress—where only certain words in a sentence or phrase are stressed—are important features of received pronunciation. Indian native languages are actually syllable-timed languages, like French. Indian-English speakers usually speak with a syllabic rhythm.[43] Further, in some Indian languages, stress is associated with a low pitch,[44] whereas in most English dialects, stressed syllables are generally pronounced with a higher pitch. Thus, when some Indian speakers speak, they appear to put the stress accents at the wrong syllables, or accentuate all the syllables of a long English word. Certain Indian accents possess a 'sing-song' quality, a feature seen in a few English dialects of Britain, such as Scouse and Welsh English.[45]
The Indian numbering system is preferred for digit grouping. When written in words, or when spoken, numbers less than 100,000/100 000 are expressed just as they are in Standard English. Numbers including and beyond 100,000 /100 000 are expressed in a subset of the Indian numbering system. Thus, the following scale is used:
In digits (International system) | In digits (Indian system) | In words (long and short scales) | In words (Indian system) | |
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10 | ten | |||
100 | ||||
1,000 | one thousand | |||
10,000 | ten thousand | |||
100,000 | 1,00,000 | one hundred thousand | one lakh (from lākh लाख) | |
1,000,000 | 10,00,000 | one million | ten lakh (from lākh लाख) | |
10,000,000 | 1,00,00,000 | ten million | one crore (from karoṛ करोड़) | |
100,000,000 | 10,00,00,000 | hundred million | ten crore | |
1,000,000,000 | 1,00,00,00,000 | one billion | one arab | |
10,000,000,000 | 10,00,00,00,000 | ten billion | ten arab | |
100,000,000,000 | 1,00,00,00,00,000 | hundred billion | one kharab |
Larger numbers are generally expressed as multiples of the above (for example, one lakh crores for one trillion).[46][47]
Indian English has political, sociological, and administrative terms of modern India: dharna, hartal, eve-teasing, vote bank, swaraj, swadeshi, scheduled caste, scheduled tribe, NRI. It includes Anglo-Indian words such as tiffin, hill station, gymkhana. Indian English also has slang.
Some examples unique to, or chiefly used in, standard written Indian English include:
Indian English uses the same British English spelling as Commonwealth nations such as the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and South Africa.[which?][citation needed]
“ | Wikipedia's India estimate of 350 million includes two categories – 'English Speakers' and 'English Users'. The distinction between the Speakers and Users is that Users only know how to read English words while Speakers know how to read English, understand spoken English as well as form their own sentences to converse in English. The distinction becomes clear when you consider China's numbers. China has over 200 million that can read English words but, as anyone can see on the streets of China, only a few million are English speakers. | ” |
Languages of India | |
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Foreign | English – 200 million (L2 speakers 2003)[5] |
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Languages spoken in India belong to several language families, the major ones being the Indo-Aryan languages spoken by 78.05% of Indians and the Dravidian languages spoken by 19.64% of Indians.[6][7] Languages spoken by the remaining 2.31% of the population belong to the Austroasiatic, Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai and a few other minor language families and isolates.[8]:283 India (780) has the world's second highest number of languages, after Papua New Guinea (839).[9]
Article 343 of the Indian constitution stated that the official language of the Union should become Hindi in Devanagari script instead of the extant English. But this was thought to be a violation of the constitution's guarantee of federalism. Later, a constitutional amendment, The Official Languages Act, 1963, allowed for the continuation of English in the Indian government indefinitely until legislation decides to change it.[2] The form of numerals to be used for the official purposes of the Union were supposed to be the international form of Indian numerals, distinct from the numerals used in most English-speaking countries.[1] Despite the misconceptions, Hindi is not the national language of India. The Constitution of India does not give any language the status of national language.[10][11]
The Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution lists 22 languages,[12] which have been referred to as scheduled languages and given recognition, status and official encouragement. In addition, the Government of India has awarded the distinction of classical language to Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Sanskrit, Tamil and Telugu. Classical language status is given to languages which have a rich heritage and independent nature.
According to the Census of India of 2001, India has 122 major languages and 1599 other languages. However, figures from other sources vary, primarily due to differences in definition of the terms 'language' and 'dialect'. The 2001 Census recorded 30 languages which were spoken by more than a million native speakers and 122 which were spoken by more than 10,000 people.[13] Two contact languages have played an important role in the history of India: Persian[14] and English.[15]Persian was the court language during the Mughal period in India. It reigned as an administrative language for several centuries until the era of British colonisation.[16]English continues to be an important language in India. It is used in higher education and in some areas of the Indian government. Hindi, the most commonly spoken language in India today, serves as the lingua franca across much of North and Central India.[17] However, there have been anti-Hindi agitations in South India, most notably in the state of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.[18][19] Maharashtra, West Bengal, Assam, Punjab and other non-Hindi regions have also started to voice concerns about Hindi.[20]
The Southern Indian languages are from the Dravidian family. The Dravidian languages are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent.[21]Proto-Dravidian languages were spoken in India in the 4th millennium BCE and started disintegrating into various branches around 3rd millennium BCE.[22] The Dravidian languages are classified in four groups: North, Central (Kolami–Parji), South-Central (Telugu–Kui), and South Dravidian (Tamil-Kannada).[23]
The Northern Indian languages from the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family evolved from Old Indic by way of the Middle IndicPrakrit languages and Apabhraṃśa of the Middle Ages. The Indo-Aryan languages developed and emerged in three stages — Old Indo-Aryan (1500 BCE to 600 BCE), Middle Indo-Aryan stage (600 BCE and 1000 CE) and New Indo-Aryan (between 1000 CE and 1300 CE). The modern north Indian Indo-Aryan languages all evolved into distinct, recognisable languages in the New Indo-Aryan Age.[24]
Persian or Farsi, was brought into India by the Ghaznavids and other Turko-Afghan dynasties as the court language. Culturally Persianized, they, in combination with the later Mughal dynasty (of Turco-Mongol origin), influenced the art, history and literature of the region for more than 500 years, resulting in the Persianisation of many Indian tongues, mainly lexically. In 1837, the British replaced Persian with English and Hindustani in Perso-Arabic script for administrative purposes and the Hindi movement of the 19th Century replaced Persianised vocabulary with Sanskrit derivations and replaced or supplemented the use of Perso-Arabic script for administrative purposes with Devanagari.[14][25]
Each of the northern Indian languages had different influences. For example, Hindustani was strongly influenced by Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian, leading to the emergence of Modern Standard Hindi and Modern Standard Urdu as registers of the Hindustani language.[26][27]
The first official survey of language diversity in the Indian subcontinent was carried out by Sir George Abraham Grierson from 1898 to 1928. Titled the Linguistic Survey of India, it reported a total of 179 languages and 544 dialects.[28] However, the results were skewed due to ambiguities in distinguishing between 'dialect' and 'language',[28] use of untrained personnel and under-reporting of data from South India, as the former provinces of Burma and Madras, as well as the princely states of Cochin, Hyderabad, Mysore and Travancore were not included in the survey.[29]
Different sources give widely differing figures, primarily based on how the terms 'language' and 'dialect' are defined and grouped. Ethnologue, produced by the Christian evangelist organisation SIL International, lists 461 tongues for India (out of 6,912 worldwide), 447 of which are living, while 14 are extinct. The 447 living languages are further subclassified in Ethnologue as follows:-[30][31]
The People’s Linguistic Survey of India, a privately owned research institution in India, has recorded over 66 different scripts and more than 780 languages in India during its nationwide survey, which the organisation claims to be the biggest linguistic survey in India.[32]
The People of India (POI) project of Anthropological Survey of India reported 325 languages which are used for in-group communication by 5,633 Indian communities.[33]
The Census of India records and publishes data with respect to the number of speakers for languages and dialects, but uses its own unique terminology, distinguishing between language and mother tongue. The mother tongues are grouped within each language. Many of the mother tongues so defined could be considered a language rather than a dialect by linguistic standards. This is especially so for many mother tongues with tens of millions of speakers that are officially grouped under the language Hindi.
Separate figures for Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi were not issued, due to the fact the returns were intentionally recorded incorrectly in states such as East Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, PEPSU, and Bilaspur.[34]
The 1961 census recognised 1,652 mother tongues spoken by 438,936,918 people, counting all declarations made by any individual at the time when the census was conducted.[35] However, the declaring individuals often mixed names of languages with those of dialects, subdialects and dialect clusters or even castes, professions, religions, localities, regions, countries and nationalities.[35] The list therefore includes languages with barely a few individual speakers as well as 530 unclassified mother tongues and more than 100 idioms that are non-native to India, including linguistically unspecific demonyms such as 'African', 'Canadian' or 'Belgian'.[35]
The 1991 census recognises 1,576 classified mother tongues.[36] According to the 1991 census, 22 languages had more than a million native speakers, 50 had more than 100,000 and 114 had more than 10,000 native speakers. The remaining accounted for a total of 566,000 native speakers (out of a total of 838 million Indians in 1991).[36][37]
According to the most recent census of 2001, there are 1635 rationalised mother tongues, 234 identifiable mother tongues and 22 major languages.[13] Of these, 29 languages have more than a million native speakers, 60 have more than 100,000 and 122 have more than 10,000 native speakers.[38] There are a few languages like Kodava that do not have a script but have a group of native speakers in Coorg (Kodagu).[39]
The language-related data results of the 2011 Census have not yet been released by the Government of India.[40]
Language | First language speakers[41] | First language speakers as a percentage of total population | Second language speakers (millions) | Third language speakers (millions) | Total speakers (millions)[42][43] | Total speakers as a percentage of total population |
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Hindi | 528,347,193 | 43.63 | 139 | 24 | 692 | 57.1 |
English | 259,678 | 0.02 | 83 | 46 | 129 | 10.6 |
Bengali | 97,237,669 | 8.30 | 9 | 1 | 107 | 8.9 |
Marathi | 83,026,680 | 7.09 | 13 | 3 | 99 | 8.2 |
Telugu | 81,127,740 | 6.93 | 12 | 1 | 95 | 7.8 |
Tamil | 69,026,881 | 5.89 | 7 | 1 | 77 | 6.3 |
Gujarati | 55,492,554 | 4.74 | 4 | 1 | 60 | 5.0 |
Urdu | 50,772,631 | 4.34 | 11 | 1 | 63 | 5.2 |
Kannada | 43,706,512 | 3.73 | 14 | 1 | 59 | 4.94 |
Odia | 37,521,324 | 3.20 | 5 | 0.03 | 43 | 3.56 |
Malayalam | 34,838,819 | 2.97 | 0.05 | 0.02 | 36.0 | 2.9 |
Punjabi | 33,124,726 | 2.83 | 0.03 | 0.003 | 36.6 | 3.02 |
Sanskrit | 24,821 | <0.000001 | 0.01 | 0.003 | 0.025 | 0.01 |
Ethnolinguistically, the languages of South Asia, echoing the complex history and geography of the region, form a complex patchwork of language families, language phyla and isolates.[8] Languages spoken in India belong to several language families, the major ones being the Indo-Aryan languages spoken by 78.05% of Indians and the Dravidian languages spoken by 19.64% of Indians. The languages of India belong to several language families, the most important of which are :[44][6][7][8][45]
Rank | Language Family | Population (2018) |
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1 | Indo-Aryan language family | 1,045,000,000 (78.05%) |
2 | Dravidian language family | 265,000,000 (19.64%) |
3 | Austroasiatic language family | Unknown |
4 | Sino-Tibetan language family | Unknown |
5 | Tai–Kadai language family | Unknown |
6 | Great Andamanese languages | Unknown |
Total | Languages of India | 1,340,000,000 |
The largest of the language families represented in India, in terms of speakers, is the Indo-Aryan language family, a branch of the Indo-Iranian family, itself the easternmost, extant subfamily of the Indo-European language family.This language family predominates, accounting for some 1035 million speakers, or over 76.5 of the population, as per 2018 estimate. The most widely spoken languages of this group are Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Urdu, Gujarati, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Rajasthani, Sindhi, Assamese (Asamiya), Maithili and Odia.[46] Aside from the Indo-Aryan languages, other Indo-European languages are also spoken in India, the most prominent of which is English, as a lingua franca.
The second largest language family is the Dravidian language family, accounting for some 277 million speakers, or approximately 20.5% as per 2018 estimate The Dravidian languages are spoken mainly in southern India and parts of eastern and central India as well as in parts of northeastern Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh. The Dravidian languages with the most speakers are Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam.[7] Besides the mainstream population, Dravidian languages are also spoken by small scheduled tribe communities, such as the Oraon and Gond tribes.[47] Only two Dravidian languages are exclusively spoken outside India, Brahui in Pakistan and Dhangar, a dialect of Kurukh, in Nepal.[48]
Families with smaller numbers of speakers are Austroasiatic and numerous small Sino-Tibetan languages, with some 10 and 6 million speakers, respectively, together 3% of the population.[49]
The Austroasiatic language family (austro meaning South) is the autochthonous language in South Asia and Southeast Asia, other language families having arrived by migration. Austroasiatic languages of mainland India are the Khasi and Munda languages, including Santhali. The languages of the Nicobar islands also form part of this language family. With the exceptions of Khasi and Santhali, all Austroasiatic languages on Indian territory are endangered.[8]:456–457
The Sino-Tibetan language family are well represented in India. However, their interrelationships are not discernible, and the family has been described as 'a patch of leaves on the forest floor' rather than with the conventional metaphor of a 'family tree'.[8]:283–5
Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken across the Himalayas in the regions of Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Arunachal Pradesh, and also in the Indian states of West Bengal, Assam (hills and autonomous councils),[50][51][52]Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Tripura and Mizoram. Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in India include the scheduled languages Meitei and Bodo, the non-scheduled languages of Karbi, Lepcha, and many varieties of several related Tibetic, West Himalayish, Tani, Brahmaputran, Angami–Pochuri, Tangkhul, Zeme, Kukish language groups, amongst many others.
Ahom language, a Southwestern Tai language, had been once the dominant language of the Ahom Kingdom in modern-day Assam, but was later replaced by the Assamese language (known as Kamrupi in ancient era which is the pre-form of the Kamrupi dialect of today). Nowadays, small Tai communities and their languages remain in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh together with Sino-Tibetans, e.g. Tai Phake, Tai Aiton and Tai Khamti, which are similar to the Shan language of Shan State, Myanmar; the Dai language of Yunnan, China; the Lao language of Laos; the Thai language of Thailand; and the Zhuang language in Guangxi, China.
The extinct and endangered languages of the Andaman Islands form a fifth Andamanese- , comprising two families, namely:[53]
In addition, Sentinelese, an unattested language of the Andaman Islands, is generally considered to be related and part of the aerial group.[53]
The only language found in the Indian mainland that is considered a language isolate is Nihali.[8]:337 The status of Nihali is ambiguous, having been considered as a distinct Austroasiatic language, as a dialect of Korku and also as being a 'thieves' argot' rather than a legitimate language.[54][55]
The other language isolates found in the rest of South Asia include Burushaski, a language spoken in Gilgit–Baltistan (administered by Pakistan), Kusunda (in western Nepal) and Vedda (in Sri Lanka).[8]:283 The validity of the Great Andamanese language group as a language family has been questioned and it has been considered a language isolate by some authorities.[8]:283[56][57]
In addition, a Bantu language, Sidi, was spoken until the mid-20th century in Gujarat.[8]:528
The language families in India are not necessarily related to the various ethnic groups in India, specifically the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian people. The languages within each family have been influenced to a large extent by both families.
Urdu has also had a significant influence on many of today's Indian languages. Many North Indian languages have lost much of their Sanskritised base (50% current vocabulary) to a more Urdu-based form. In terms of the written script, most Indian languages, nearly perfectly accommodate the Sanskrit language. South Indian languages have adopted new letters to write various Indo-Aryan based words as well, and have added new letters to their native alphabets as the languages began to mix and influence each other.
Though various Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages may seem mutually exclusive when first heard, there is a much deeper underlying influence that both language families have had on each other down to a linguistic science. There is proof of the intermixing of Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages through the pockets of Dravidian-based languages on remote areas of Pakistan, and interspersed areas of North India. In addition, there is a whole science regarding the tonal and cultural expression within the languages that are quite standard across India. Languages may have different vocabulary, but various hand and tonal gestures within two unrelated languages can still be common due to cultural amalgamations between invading people and the natives over time; in this case, the Indo-Aryan peoples and the native Dravidian people.
Prior to Independence, in British India, English was the sole language used for administrative purposes as well as for higher education purposes.[59]
In 1946, the issue of national language was a bitterly contested subject in the proceedings of the Constituent Assembly of India, specifically what should be the language in which the Constitution of India is written and the language spoken during the proceedings of Parliament and thus deserving of the epithet 'national'. Members belonging to the northern parts of India insisted that the Constitution be drafted in Hindi with the unofficial translation in English. This was not agreed to by the drafting Committee on the grounds that English was much better to craft the nuanced prose on constitutional subjects. The efforts to make Hindi the pre-eminent language were bitterly resisted by the members from those parts of India where Hindi was not spoken natively. Eventually, a compromise was reached with Hindi in Devanagari script to be the official language of the union but for 'fifteen years from the commencement of the Constitution, the English Language shall continue to be used for all the official purposes of the Union for which it was being used immediately before such commencement'.[59]
Article 343 (1) of the Constitution of India states 'The Official Language of the Union government shall be Hindi in Devanagari script.'[60]:212[61] Unless Parliament decided otherwise, the use of English for official purposes was to cease 15 years after the constitution came into effect, i.e. on 26 January 1965.[60]:212[61]
As the date for changeover approached, however, there was much alarm in the non Hindi-speaking areas of India, especially in Kerala, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, West Bengal, Karnataka, Puducherry and Andhra Pradesh. Accordingly, Jawaharlal Nehru ensured the enactment of the Official Languages Act, 1963,[62][63] which provided that English 'may' still be used with Hindi for official purposes, even after 1965.[59] The wording of the text proved unfortunate in that while Nehru understood that 'may' meant shall, politicians championing the cause of Hindi thought it implied exactly the opposite.[59]
In the event, as 1965 approached, India's new Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri prepared to make Hindi paramount with effect from 26 January 1965. This led to widespread agitation, riots, self-immolations and suicides in Tamil Nadu. The split of Congress politicians from the South from their party stance, the resignation of two Union ministers from the South and the increasing threat to the country's unity forced Shastri to concede.[59][19]
As a result, the proposal was dropped,[64][65] and the Act itself was amended in 1967 to provide that the use of English would not be ended until a resolution to that effect was passed by the legislature of every state that had not adopted Hindi as its official language, and by each house of the Indian Parliament.[62]
The Constitution of India does not give any language the status of national language.[10][11]
Hindi, written in Devanagari script, is the most prominent language spoken in the country. In the 2001 census, 422 million (422,048,642) people in India reported Hindi to be their native language.[66] This figure not only included Hindi speakers of Hindustani, but also people who identify as native speakers of related languages who consider their speech to be a dialect of Hindi, the Hindi belt. Hindi (or Hindustani) is the native language of most people living in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, and Rajasthan.[67]
'Modern Standard Hindi', a standardised language is one of the official languages of the Union of India. In addition, it is one of only two languages used for business in Parliament however the Rajya Sabha now allows all 22 official languages on the Eighth Schedule to be spoken.[68]
Hindustani, evolved from khari boli (खड़ी बोली), a prominent tongue of Mughal times, which itself evolved from Apabhraṃśa, an intermediary transition stage from Prakrit, from which the major North Indian Indo-Aryan languages have evolved.[citation needed]
Varieties of Hindi spoken in India include Rajasthani, Braj Bhasha, Haryanvi, Bundeli, Kannauji, Hindustani, Awadhi, Bagheli, Bhojpuri, Magahi, Nagpuri and Chhattisgarhi. By virtue of its being a lingua franca, Hindi has also developed regional dialects such as Bambaiya Hindi in Mumbai. In addition, a trade language, Andaman Creole Hindi has also developed in the Andaman Islands.[69]
In addition, by use in popular culture such as songs and films, Hindi also serves as a lingua franca across both North and Central India[citation needed]
Hindi is widely taught both as a primary language and language of instruction, and as a second tongue in most states.
British colonial legacy has resulted in English being a language for government, business and education. English, along with Hindi, is one of the two languages permitted in the Constitution of India for business in Parliament. Despite the fact that Hindi has official Government patronage and serves as a lingua franca over large parts of India, there was considerable opposition to the use of Hindi in the southern states of India, and English has emerged as a de factolingua franca over much of India.[59][19]
Until the Twenty-first Amendment of the Constitution of India in 1967, the country recognised 14 official regional languages. The Eighth Schedule and the Seventy-First Amendment provided for the inclusion of Sindhi, Konkani, Meitei and Nepali, thereby increasing the number of official regional languages of India to 18. The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, as of 1 December 2007, lists 22 languages,[60]:330 which are given in the table below together with the speaking population and the regions where they are used.[66]
Language | Family |
---|---|
Assamese | Indo-Aryan |
Bengali (Bangla) | Indo-Aryan |
Bodo | Sino-Tibetan |
Dogri | Indo-Aryan |
Gujarati | Indo-Aryan |
Hindi | Indo-Aryan |
Kannada | Dravidian |
Kashmiri | Indo-Aryan |
Konkani | Indo-Aryan |
Maithili | Indo-Aryan |
Malayalam | Dravidian |
Meitei | Sino-Tibetan |
Marathi | Indo-Aryan |
Nepali | Indo-Aryan |
Odia | Indo-Aryan |
Punjabi | Indo-Aryan |
Sanskrit | Indo-Aryan |
Santali | Austroasiatic |
Sindhi | Indo-Aryan |
Tamil | Dravidian |
Telugu | Dravidian |
Urdu | Indo-Aryan |
The individual states, the borders of most of which are or were drawn on socio-linguistic lines, can legislate their own official languages, depending on their linguistic demographics. The official languages chosen reflect the predominant as well as politically significant languages spoken in that state. Certain states having a linguistically defined territory may have only the predominant language in that state as its official language, examples being Karnataka and Gujarat, which have Kannada and Gujarati as their sole official language respectively. Telangana, with a sizeable Urdu-speaking Muslim population, has two languages, Telugu and Urdu, as its official languages.
Some states buck the trend by using minority languages as official languages. Jammu and Kashmir uses Urdu, which is spoken by fewer than 1% of the population. Meghalaya uses English spoken by 0.01% of the population. This phenomenon has turned majority languages into 'minority languages' in a functional sense.[71]
In addition to states and union territories, India has autonomous administrative regions which may be permitted to select their own official language – a case in point being the Bodoland Territorial Council in Assam which has declared the Bodo language as official for the region, in addition to Assamese and English already in use.[72] and Bengali in the Barak Valley,[73] as its official languages.
In British India, English was the sole language used for administrative purposes as well as for higher education purposes. When India became independent in 1947, the Indian legislators had the challenge of choosing a language for official communication as well as for communication between different linguistic regions across India. The choices available were:
The Indian constitution, in 1950, declared Hindi in Devanagari script to be the official language of the union.[60] Unless Parliament decided otherwise, the use of English for official purposes was to cease 15 years after the constitution came into effect, i.e. on 26 January 1965.[60] The prospect of the changeover, however, led to much alarm in the non Hindi-speaking areas of India, especially in South India whose native tongues are not related to Hindi. As a result, Parliament enacted the Official Languages Act in 1963,[74][75][76][77][78][79] which provided for the continued use of English for official purposes along with Hindi, even after 1965.
Native to the Bengal region, comprising the nation of Bangladesh and the states of West Bengal, Tripura and Barak Valley region [80][81]of Assam. Bengali (also spelt as Bangla: বাংলা) is the sixth most spoken language in the world.[82][83] After the partition of India (1947), refugees from East Pakistan were settled in Tripura, and Jharkhand and the union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. There is also a large number of Bengali-speaking people in Maharashtra and Gujarat where they work as artisans in jewellery industries. Bengali developed from Abahatta, a derivative of Apabhramsha, itself derived from MagadhiPrakrit. The modern Bengali vocabulary contains the vocabulary base from Magadhi Prakrit and Pali, also borrowings & reborrowings from Sanskrit and other major borrowings from Persian, Arabic, Austroasiatic languages and other languages in contact with. Like most Indian languages, Bengali has a number of dialects. It exhibits diglossia, with the literary and standard form differing greatly from the colloquial speech of the regions that identify with the language.[84] Bengali language has developed a rich cultural base spanning art, music, literature and religion. There have been many movements in defence of this language and in 1999 UNESCO declared 21 Feb as the International Mother Language Day in commemoration of the Bengali Language Movement in 1952.[85]
Marathi is an Indo-Aryan language. It is the official language and co-official language in Maharashtra and Goa states of Western India respectively, and is one of the official languages of India. There were 83 million speakers in 2011 and 72 million speakers in 2001.[86] Marathi has the third largest number of native speakers in India. Marathi has some of the oldest literature of all modern Indo-Aryan languages, dating from about 1200 AD (Mukundraj's Vivek Sindhu from the close of the 12th century). The major dialects of Marathi are Standard Marathi and the Varhadi dialect. There are other related languages such as Khandeshi, Dangi, Vadvali and Samavedi. Malvani Konkani has been heavily influenced by Marathi varieties. Marathi is one of several languages that descend from Maharashtri Prakrit. Further change led to the Apabhraṃśa languages like Old Marathi.
Marathi is the official language of Maharashtra and co-official language in the union territories of Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli. In Goa, Konkani is the sole official language; however, Marathi may also be used for all official purposes.
Over a period of many centuries the Marathi language and people came into contact with many other languages and dialects. The primary influence of Prakrit, Maharashtri, Dravidian languages, Apabhraṃśa and Sanskrit is understandable. At least 50% of the words in Marathi are either taken or derived from Sanskrit.[citation needed] Many scholars[who?] claim that Sanskrit has derived many words from Marathi.[citation needed] Marathi has also shared directions, vocabulary and grammar with languages such as Indian Dravidian languages, and foreign languages such as Persian, Arabic, English and a little from Portuguese.
Telugu is the most widely spokenDravidian language in India and around the world. Telugu is an official language in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Yanam, making it one of the few languages (along with Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu) with official status in more than one state. It is also spoken by a significant number of people in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and by the Sri Lankan Gypsy people. It is one of six languages with classical status in India. Telugu ranks fourth by the number of native speakers in India (81 million in the 2011 Census),[86] fifteenth in the Ethnologue list of most-spoken languages worldwide and is the most widely spoken Dravidian language.
Tamil (also spelt as Thamizh: தமிழ்) is a Dravidian language predominantly spoken in Tamil Nadu, Puduchery and many parts of Sri Lanka. It is also spoken by large minorities in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Malaysia, Singapore, Mauritius and throughout the world. Tamil ranks fifth by the number of native speakers in India (61 million in the 2001 Census[87][circular reference]) and ranks 20th in the list of most spoken languages.[citation needed] It is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and was the first Indian language to be declared a classical language by the Government of India in 2004. Tamil is one of the longest surviving classical languages in the world.[88][89] It has been described as 'the only language of contemporary India which is recognisably continuous with a classical past.'[90] The two earliest manuscripts from India,[91][92] acknowledged and registered by UNESCO Memory of the World register in 1997 and 2005, are in Tamil.[93]Tamil is an official language of Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Sri Lanka and Singapore. It is also recognized as minority language in Canada, Malaysia, Mauritius and South Africa.
After independence, Modern Standard Urdu, the Persianised register of Hindustani became the national language of Pakistan. During British colonial times, a knowledge of Hindustani or Urdu was a must for officials. Hindustani was made the second language of British Indian Empire after English and considered as the language of administration.[citation needed] The British introduced the use of Roman script for Hindustani as well as other languages. Urdu had 70 million speakers in India (as per the Census of 2001), and, along with Hindi, is one of the 22 officially recognised regional languages of India and also an official language in the Indian states of Jammu and Kashmir, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Telangana that have significant Muslim populations.
Gujarati is an Indo-Aryan language. It is native to the west Indian region of Gujarat. Gujarati is part of the greater Indo-Europeanlanguage family. Gujarati is descended from Old Gujarati (c. 1100 – 1500 CE), the same source as that of Rajasthani. Gujarati is the chief language in the Indian state of Gujarat. It is also an official language in the union territories of Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli. According to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 4.5% of population of India (1.21 billion according to 2011 census) speaks Gujarati. This amounts to 54.6 million speakers in India.[94]
Kannada language is a Dravidian language which branched off from Kannada-Tamil sub group around 500 B.C.E according to the Dravidian scholar Zvelebil.[95] According to the Dravidian scholars Steever and Krishnamurthy, the study of Kannada language is usually divided into three linguistic phases: Old (450–1200 CE), Middle (1200–1700 CE) and Modern (1700–present).[96][97] The earliest written records are from the 5th century,[98] and the earliest available literature in rich manuscript (Kavirajamarga) is from c. 850.[99][100] Kannada language has the second oldest written tradition of all vernacular languages of India.[101][102] Current estimates of the total number of epigraph present in Karnataka range from 25,000 by the scholar Sheldon Pollock to over 30,000 by the Sahitya Akademi,[103] making Karnataka state 'one of the most densely inscribed pieces of real estate in the world'.[104] According to Garg and Shipely, more than a thousand notable writers have contributed to the wealth of the language.[105][106]
Malayalam (/mæləˈjɑːləm/;[107]മലയാളം, Malayāḷam?[maləjaːɭəm]) has official language status in the state of Kerala and in the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry. It belongs to the Dravidian family of languages and is spoken by some 38 million people. Malayalam is also spoken in the neighboring states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka; with some speakers in the Nilgiris, Kanyakumari and Coimbatore districts of Tamil Nadu, and the Dakshina Kannada and the Kodagu district of Karnataka.[108][109][110] Malayalam originated from Middle Tamil (Sen-Tamil) in the 7th century.[111] As Malayalam began to freely borrow words as well as the rules of grammar from Sanskrit, the Grantha alphabet was adopted for writing and came to be known as Arya Eluttu.[112] This developed into the modern Malayalam script.[113]
Odia (formerly spelled Oriya)[114] is the only modern language officially recognized as a classical language from the Indo-Aryan group. Odia is primarily spoken in the Indian state of Odisha and has over 40 million speakers. It was declared as a classical language of India in 2014. Native speakers comprise 91.85% of the population in Odisha.[115][116] Odia is thought to have originated from Udra Prakrit similar to Udra Magadhi, a language spoken in eastern India over 2,500 years ago. The history of Odia language can be divided to Old Odia (3rd century BC −1200 century AD)[117], Early Middle Odia (1200–1400), Middle Odia (1400–1700), Late Middle Odia (1700–1870) and Modern Odia (1870 till present day). The National Manuscripts Mission of India have found around 213,000 unearthed and preserved manuscripts written in Odia.[118]
Punjabi, written in the Gurmukhi script in India, is one of the prominent languages of India with about 32 million speakers. In Pakistan it is spoken by over 80 million people and is written in the Shahmukhi alphabet. It is mainly spoken in Punjab but also in neighboring areas. It is an official language of Delhi and Punjab.
Asamiya or Assamese language is most popular in the state of Assam and Brahmaputra Valley.[119] It's an Eastern Indo-Aryan language having more than 10 million speakers as per world estimates by Encarta.[120]
Maithili (/ˈmaɪtɪli/;[121]Maithilī) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the Bihar and Jharkhand states of India.[122][123]In Nepal, it is spoken in the eastern Terai, and is the second most prevalent language of Nepal.[124]Tirhuta was formerly the primary script for written Maithili. Less commonly, it was also written in the local variant of Kaithi.[125] Today it is written in the Devanagari script.[126]
In 2003, Maithili was included in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution as a recognised regional language of India, which allows it to be used in education, government, and other official contexts.[127]
In 2004, the Government of India declared that languages that met certain requirements could be accorded the status of a 'Classical Language in India'.[128]. Over the next few years, several languages were granted the Classical status, and demands have been made for other languages, including Marathi.[129]
Languages thus far declared to be Classical:
In a 2006 press release, Minister of Tourism and Culture Ambika Soni told the Rajya Sabha the following criteria were laid down to determine the eligibility of languages to be considered for classification as a 'Classical Language',[136]
High antiquity of its early texts/recorded history over a period of 1500–2000 years; a body of ancient literature/texts, which is considered a valuable heritage by generations of speakers; the literary tradition be original and not borrowed from another speech community; the classical language and literature being distinct from modern, there may also be a discontinuity between the classical language and its later forms or its offshoots.
[137][138][139]
As per Government of India's Resolution No. 2-16/2004-US(Akademies) dated 1 November 2004, the benefits that will accrue to a language declared as a 'Classical Language' are:
The 2001 census identified the following native languages having more than one million speakers. Most of them are dialects/variants grouped under Hindi.[66]
Languages | No. of native speakers[66] |
---|---|
Bhojpuri | 33,099,497 |
Rajasthani | 18,355,613 |
Magadhi/Magahi | 13,978,565 |
Chhattisgarhi | 13,260,186 |
Haryanvi | 7,997,192 |
Marwari | 7,936,183 |
Malvi | 5,565,167 |
Mewari | 5,091,697 |
Khorth/Khotta | 4,725,927 |
Bundeli | 3,072,147 |
Bagheli | 2,865,011 |
Pahari | 2,832,825 |
Laman/Lambadi | 2,707,562 |
Awadhi | 2,529,308 |
Harauti | 2,462,867 |
Garhwali | 2,267,314 |
Nimadi | 2,148,146 |
Sadan/Sadri | 2,044,776 |
Kumauni | 2,003,783 |
Dhundhari | 1,871,130 |
Tulu | 1,722,768 |
Surgujia | 1,458,533 |
Bagri Rajasthani | 1,434,123 |
Banjari | 1,259,821 |
Nagpuria | 1,242,586 |
Surajpuri | 1,217,019 |
Kangri | 1,122,843 |
India has several languages in use; choosing any single language as an official language presents problems to all those whose 'mother tongue' is different. However, all the boards of education across India recognise the need for training people to one common language.[141] There are complaints that in North India, non-Hindi speakers have language trouble. Similarly, there are complaints that North Indians have to undergo difficulties on account of language when travelling to South India. It is common to hear of incidents that result due to friction between those who strongly believe in the chosen official language, and those who follow the thought that the chosen language(s) do not take into account everyone's preferences.[142] Local official language commissions have been established and various steps are being taken in a direction to reduce tensions and friction.[citation needed]
There are conflicts over linguistic rights in India. The first major linguistic conflict, known as the Anti-Hindi agitations of Tamil Nadu, took place in Tamil Nadu against the implementation of Hindi as the official language of India. Political analysts consider this as a major factor in bringing DMK to power and leading to the ousting and nearly total elimination of the Congress party in Tamil Nadu.[143] Strong cultural pride based on language is also found in other Indian states such as Karnataka, West Bengal, Punjab and Maharashtra. To express disapproval of the imposition of Hindi on its states' people as a result of the central government, the government of Maharashtra made the state languages mandatory in educational institutions.[144]
The Government of India attempts to assuage these conflicts with various campaigns, coordinated by the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, a branch of the Department of Higher Education, Language Bureau, and the Ministry of Human Resource Development.[clarification needed][citation needed]
Most languages in India are written in Brahmi-derived scripts, such as Devanagari, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Meitei Mayek, Odia, Eastern Nagari – Assamese/Bengali, etc., though Urdu is written in a script derived from Arabic, and a few minor languages such as Santali use independent scripts.[citation needed]
Various Indian languages have their own scripts. Hindi, Marathi, Maithili[145] and Angika are languages written using the Devanagari script. Most major languages are written using a script specific to them, such as Assamese (Asamiya)[146][147][148] with Asamiya,[149]Bengali with Bengali, Punjabi with Gurmukhi, Meitei with Meitei Mayek, Odia with Odia script, Gujarati with Gujarati, etc. Urdu and sometimes Kashmiri, Saraiki and Sindhi are written in modified versions of the Perso-Arabic script. With this one exception, the scripts of Indian languages are native to India. Languages like Kodava that didn't have a script whereas Tulu which had a script adopted Kannada due to its readily available printing settings; these languages have taken up the scripts of the local official languages as their own and are written in the Kannada script.[150]
Tamil-Brahmi inscription in Jambaimalai.
Silver coin issued during the reign of Rudra Singha with Assamese inscriptions.
North Indian Brahmi found in Ashok pillar.
The Halmidi inscription, the oldest known inscription in the Kannada script and language. The inscription is dated to the 450 CE - 500 CE period.
An early Telugu inscription found in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh.
.. Hindustani is the basis for both languages ..
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Languages of India |
Dravidian | |
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Geographic distribution | South Asia and Southeast Asia, mainly South India and Sri Lanka |
Linguistic classification | One of the world's primary language families |
Proto-language | Proto-Dravidian |
Subdivisions |
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ISO 639-2 / 5 | dra |
Linguasphere | 49= (phylozone) |
Glottolog | drav1251[1] |
Distribution of subgroups of Dravidian languages: |
Part of a series on |
Dravidian culture and history |
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Portal:Dravidian civilizations |
The Dravidian languages are a language family spoken mainly in Southern India and parts of Central and Eastern India, as well as in Sri Lanka with small pockets in southwestern Pakistan, southern Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan,[2] and overseas in other countries such as Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore. The Dravidian languages with the most speakers are Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. There are also small groups of Dravidian-speaking scheduled tribes, who live outside Dravidian-speaking areas, such as the Kurukh in Eastern India and Gondi in Central India.[3] The Dravidian languages are spoken by more than 215 million people in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.[4]
Though some scholars have argued that the Dravidian languages may have been brought to India by migrations in the fourth or third millennium BCE[5][6] or even earlier,[7][8] the Dravidian languages cannot easily be connected to any other language family and they could well be indigenous to India.[9][10][11][note 1]
Epigraphically the Dravidian languages have been attested since the 2nd century BCE as Tamil-Brahmi script on the cave walls discovered in the Madurai and Tirunelveli districts of Tamil Nadu.[13] Only two Dravidian languages are spoken exclusively outside the post-1947 state of India: Brahui in the Balochistan region of Pakistan and Afghanistan; and Dhangar, a dialect of Kurukh, in parts of Nepal and Bhutan. Dravidian place names along the Arabian Sea coasts and Dravidian grammatical influence such as clusivity in the Indo-Aryan languages, namely Marathi, Konkani, Gujarati, Marwari, and Sindhi, suggest that Dravidian languages were once spoken more widely across the Indian subcontinent.[14][15]
The origin of the Sanskrit word drāviḍa is the word tamiẓ (Tamil).[16]Kamil Zvelebil cites the forms such as dramila (in Daṇḍin's Sanskrit work Avanisundarīkathā) damiḷa (found in the Sri Lankan (Ceylonese) chronicle Mahavamsa) and then goes on to say, 'The forms damiḷa/damila almost certainly provide a connection of dr(a/ā)viḍa ' and '.. tamiḷ < tamiẓ ..whereby the further development might have been *tamiẓ > *damiḷ > damiḷa- / damila- and further, with the intrusive, 'hypercorrect' (or perhaps analogical) -r-, into dr(a/ā)viḍa. The -m-/-v- alternation is a common enough phenomenon in Dravidian phonology'[17]Zvelebil in his earlier treatise states, 'It is obvious that the Sanskrit dr(a/ā)viḍa, Pali damila, damiḷo and Prakrit d(a/ā)viḍa are all etymologically connected with tamiẓ', and further remarks, 'The r in tamiẓ → dr(a/ā)viḍa is a hypercorrect insertion, cf. an analogical case of DED 1033 Ta. kamuku, Tu. kangu 'areca nut': Skt. kramu(ka).'[18]
Furthermore, another Dravidianist and linguist, Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, in his book Dravidian Languages states:[19]
Joseph (1989: IJDL 18.2:134-42) gives extensive references to the use of the term draviḍa, dramila first as the name of a people, then of a country. Sinhala BCE inscriptions cite dameḍa-, damela- denoting Tamil merchants. Early Buddhist and Jaina sources used damiḷa- to refer to a people of south India (presumably Tamil); damilaraṭṭha- was a southern non-Aryan country; dramiḷa-, dramiḍa, and draviḍa- were used as variants to designate a country in the south (Bṛhatsamhita-, Kādambarī, Daśakumāracarita-, fourth to seventh centuries CE) (1989: 134–138). It appears that damiḷa- was older than draviḍa- which could be its Sanskritization.
Based on what Krishnamurti states (referring to a scholarly paper published in the International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics), the Sanskrit word draviḍa itself is later than damiḷa since the dates for the forms with -r- are centuries later than the dates for the forms without -r- (damiḷa, dameḍa-, damela- etc.).
The 14th century Sanskrit text Lilatilakam, which is a grammar of Manipravalam, states that the spoken languages of present-day Kerala and Tamil Nadu were similar, terming them as 'Dramiḍa'. The author doesn't consider the 'Karṇṇāṭa' (Kannada) and the 'Andhra' (Telugu) languages as 'Dramiḍa', because they were very different from the language of the 'Tamil Veda' (Tiruvaymoli), but states that some people would include them in the 'Dramiḍa' category.[20]
In 1816, Alexander D. Campbell suggested the existence of a Dravidian language family in his Grammar of the Teloogoo Language,[21] in which he and Francis W. Ellis argued that Tamil and Telugu descended from a common, non-Indo-European ancestor.[22] In 1856 Robert Caldwell published his Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages,[23] which considerably expanded the Dravidian umbrella and established Dravidian as one of the major language groups of the world. Caldwell coined the term 'Dravidian' for this family of languages, based on the usage of the Sanskrit word द्रविदा (Dravidā) in the work Tantravārttika by Kumārila Bhaṭṭa.[24] In his own words, Caldwell says,
The word I have chosen is 'Dravidian', from Drāviḍa, the adjectival form of Draviḍa. This term, it is true, has sometimes been used, and is still sometimes used, in almost as restricted a sense as that of Tamil itself, so that though on the whole it is the best term I can find, I admit it is not perfectly free from ambiguity. It is a term which has already been used more or less distinctively by Sanskrit philologists, as a generic appellation for the South Indian people and their languages, and it is the only single term they ever seem to have used in this manner. I have, therefore, no doubt of the propriety of adopting it.[25]
The 1961 publication of the Dravidian etymological dictionary by T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau proved a notable event in the study of Dravidian linguistics.
The Dravidian languages form a close-knit family. Most scholars agree on four groups: South (or South DravidianI), South-Central (or South DravidianII), Central, and North Dravidian, but there are different proposals regarding the relationship between these groups. Earlier classifications grouped Central and South-Central Dravidian in a single branch. Krishnamurti groups South-Central and South Dravidian.[26] Languages recognized as official languages of India appear here in boldface.
South Dravidian[26][27] |
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South-Central Dravidian[26][28] |
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Central Dravidian[26][28] |
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North Dravidian[26][29] |
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Some authors deny that North Dravidian forms a valid subgroup, splitting it into Northeast (Kurukh–Malto) and Northwest (Brahui).[30] Their affiliation has been proposed based primarily on a small number of common phonetic developments, including:
McAlpin (2003)[31] notes that no exact conditioning can be established for the first two changes, and proposes that distinct Proto-Dravidian *q and *kʲ should be reconstructed behind these correspondences, and that Brahui, Kurukh-Malto, and the rest of Dravidian may be three coordinate branches, possibly with Brahui being the earliest language to split off. A few morphological parallels between Brahui and Kurukh-Malto are also known, but according to McAlpin they are analyzable as shared archaisms rather than shared innovations.
In addition, Ethnologue lists several unclassified Dravidian languages: Allar, Bazigar, Bharia, Malankuravan (possibly a dialect of Malayalam), and Vishavan. Ethnologue also lists several unclassified Southern Dravidian languages: Mala Malasar, Malasar, Thachanadan, Ullatan, Kalanadi, Kumbaran, Kunduvadi, Kurichiya, Attapady Kurumba, Muduga, Pathiya, and Wayanad Chetti.Pattapu may also be Southern.
A computational phylogenetic study of the Dravidian language family was undertaken by Kolipakam, et al. (2018).[32] Kolipakam, et al. (2018) supports the internal coherence of the four Dravidian branches South (or South Dravidian I), South-Central (or South Dravidian II), Central, and North, but is uncertain about the precise relationships of these four branches to each other. The date of Dravidian is estimated to be 4,500 years old.[32]
Speakers of Dravidian languages, by language
Since 1981, the Census of India has reported only languages with more than 10,000 speakers, including 17 Dravidian languages. In 1981, these accounted for approximately 24% of India's population.[33][34]
In the 2001 census, they included 214 million people, about 21% of India's total population of 1.02 billion.[35] In addition, the largest Dravidian-speaking group outside India, Tamil speakers in Sri Lanka, number around 4.7 million. The total number of speakers of Dravidian languages is around 227 million people, around 13% of the population of the Indian subcontinent.
Telugu is the most spoken Dravidian language, with over 74 million native speakers. The total number of speakers of Telugu, including those whose first language is not Telugu, is around 84 million people, which is around 6% of India's total population.
The smallest branch of the Dravidian languages is the Central branch, which has only around 200,000 speakers. These languages are mostly tribal, and spoken in central India.
The second-smallest branch is the Northern branch, with around 6.3 million speakers. This is the only sub-group to have a language spoken in Pakistan — Brahui.
The next-largest is the South-Central branch, which has 78 million native speakers, the vast majority of whom speak Telugu. This branch also includes the tribal language Gondi spoken in central India.
The largest group is South Dravidian, with almost 150 million speakers. Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada make up around 98% of the speakers, with Tamil being by far the most spoken language, with almost half of all South Dravidian speakers speaking it.
Language | Number of Speakers | Location |
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Brahui | 2,430,000 | Balochistan, Pakistan |
Kurukh | 2,280,000 | Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, Nepal |
Malto | 234,000 | Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal |
Kurambhag Paharia | 12,500 | Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha |
Language | Number of Speakers | Location |
---|---|---|
Kolami | 122,000 | Maharashtra, Telangana |
Duruwa | 51,000 | Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh |
Ollari | 15,000 | Odisha, Andhra Pradesh |
Naiki | 10,000 | Maharashtra |
Language | Number of Speakers | Location |
---|---|---|
Telugu | 81,100,000 | Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and parts of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Puducherry, United States, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Mauritius, Australia, South Africa, Canada, UK, UAE, Myanmar, France and Réunion. |
Gondi | 2,980,000 | Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh |
Muria | 1,000,000 | Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Odisha |
Kui | 942,000 | Odisha, Andhra Pradesh |
Koya | 360,000 | Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Chhattisgarh |
Madiya | 360,000 | Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Maharashtra |
Kuvi | 155,000 | Odisha, Andhra Pradesh |
Pengo | 350,000 | Odisha |
Pardhan | 135,000 | Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh |
Khirwar | 36,400 | Chhattisgarh (Surguja district) |
Chenchu | 26,000 | Andhra Pradesh, Telangana |
Konda | 20,000 | Andhra Pradesh, Odisha |
Manda | 4,040 | Odisha |
Language | Number of speakers | Location |
---|---|---|
Tamil | 75,000,000 | Tamil Nadu, Puducherry (including Karaikkal), parts of Andhra Pradesh (Chittoor and Nellore districts), Karnataka (Bangalore, Kolar), Kerala (Palakkad and Idukki districts), Andaman and Nicobar, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia, Mauritius, Myanmar, Canada, United States, UK, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Reunion Island[36][37][unreliable source?] |
Kannada | 56,600,000 | Karnataka, Kerala (Kasaragod district) and Maharashtra (Solapur, Sangli), Tamil Nadu (Salem, Ooty, Coimbatore,Krishnagiri,Chennai), Andhra Pradesh (Ananthpur, Kurnool), Telangana (HyderabadMedak and Mehaboobnagar), United States, Australia, GermanyUKUAEBahrain |
Malayalam | 38,000,000 | Kerala, Lakshadweep, Mahe district of Puducherry, Dakshina Kannada and Kodagu districts of Karnataka, Coimbatore, Neelagiri and Kanyakumari districts of Tamil Nadu, UAE, United States, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, UK, Qatar, Bahrain, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore. |
Tulu | 1,850,000 | Karnataka (Dakshina Kannada, Udupi districts) and Kerala (Kasaragod district), Across Maharashtra especially in cities like Mumbai, Thane and Gulf Countries(UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain) [38] |
Beary | 1,500,000 | Karnataka (Dakshina Kannada, Udupi districts) and Kerala (Kasaragod district) |
Irula | 200,000 | Tamil Nadu (Nilgiris district), Karnataka (Mysore district). |
Kurumba | 180,000 | Tamil Nadu (Nilgiris district) |
Badaga | 133,000 | Karnataka (Mysore district), Tamil Nadu (Nilgiris district), |
Kodava | 100,000 | Karnataka (Kodagu district) |
Paniya | 22,000 | Karnataka (Kodagu district), Kerala, Tamil Nadu |
Yerukala | 69,500 | Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Telangana |
Jeseri | 65,000 | Lakshadweep |
Betta Kurumba | 32,000 | Karnataka (Chamarajanagar district, Kodagu district, Mysore district), Kerala (Wayanad district), Tamil Nadu (Nilgiri District) |
Kurichiya | 29,000 | Kerala (Kannur district, Kozhikode district, Wayanad district) |
Ravula | 27,000 | Karnataka (Kodagu district), Kerala (Kannur district, Wayanad district) |
Mullu Kurumba | 26,000 | Kerala (Wayanad district), Tamil Nadu (The Nilgiris District) |
Sholaga | 24,000 | Tamil Nadu, Karnataka (Mysore district) |
Kaikadi | 26,000 | Madhya Pradesh (Betul district), Maharashtra (Amravati district) |
Kanikkaran | 19,000 | Kerala, Tamil Nadu (Kanyakumari district, Tirunelveli district) |
Malankuravan | 18,600 | Tamil Nadu (Kanyakumari district), Kerala (Kollam district, Kottayam district, Thiruvananthapuram district) |
Muthuvan | 16,800 | Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu (Coimbatore district, Madurai district) |
Koraga | 14,000 | Karnataka (Dakshina Kannada, Udupi districts) and Kerala (Kasaragod district) |
Kumbaran | 10,000 | Kerala (Kozhikode district, Malappuram district, Wayanad district) |
Paliyan | 9,500 | Kerala (Idukki district, Ernakulam district, Kottayam district), Tamil Nadu, Karnataka |
Malasar | 7,800 | Kerala (Palakkad district), Tamil Nadu (Coimbatore district) |
Malapandaram | 5,900 | Kerala (Kollam district, Pathanamthitta district), Tamil Nadu (Coimbatore district, Madurai district, Viluppuram district) |
Eravallan | 5,000 | Kerala (Palakkad district), Tamil Nadu (Coimbatore district) |
Wayanad Chetti | 5,000 | Karnataka, Kerala (Wayanad district), Tamil Nadu (Coimbatore district, The Nilgiris District, Erode district) |
Muduga | 3,400 | Kerala (Palakkad district), Tamil Nadu (Coimbatore district, The Nilgiris District) |
Thachanadan | 3,000 | Kerala (Malappuram district, Wayanad district) |
Kadar | 2,960 | Kerala (Thrissur district, Palakkad district), Tamil Nadu (Coimbatore district) |
Toda | 1,560 | Karnataka (Mysore district), Tamil Nadu (Nilgiris district) |
Attapady Kurumba | 1,370 | Kerala (Palakkad district) |
Kunduvadi | 1,000 | Kerala (Kozhikode district, Wayanad district) |
Mala Malasar | 1,000 | Kerala (Palakkad district), Tamil Nadu (Coimbatore district) |
Pathiya | 1,000 | Kerala (Wayanad district) |
Kota | 930 | Tamil Nadu (Nilgiris district) |
Kalanadi | 750 | Kerala (Wayanad district) |
Holiya | 500 | Madhya Pradesh (Balaghat district, Seoni district), Maharashtra, Karnataka |
Aranadan | 200 | Kerala (Malappuram district) |
Language | Number of Speakers | Location |
---|---|---|
Bharia | 197,000 | Chhattisgarh (Bilaspur district, Durg district, Surguja district), Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal |
Bazigar | 58,000 | Haryana, Punjab (Fatehgarh Sahib district, Patiala district), Uttar Pradesh (Muzaffarnagar district, Saharanpur district) |
Allar | 350 | Kerala (Palakkad district, Malappuram district) |
Vishavan | 150 | Kerala (Ernakulam district, Kottayam district, Thrissur district) |
The Dravidian family has defied all of the attempts to show a connection with other languages, including Indo-European, Hurrian, Basque, Sumerian, Korean and Japanese. Comparisons have been made not just with the other language families of the Indian subcontinent (Indo-European, Austroasiatic, Sino-Tibetan, and Nihali), but with all typologically similar language families of the Old World. Nonetheless, although there are no readily detectable genealogical connections, Dravidian shares strong areal features with the Indo-Aryan languages, which have been attributed to a substratum influence from Dravidian.[39]
Dravidian languages display typological similarities with the Uralic language group, suggesting to some a prolonged period of contact in the past.[40] This idea is popular amongst Dravidian linguists and has been supported by a number of scholars, including Robert Caldwell,[41]Thomas Burrow,[42]Kamil Zvelebil,[43] and Mikhail Andronov.[44] This hypothesis has, however, been rejected by some specialists in Uralic languages,[45] and has in recent times also been criticised by other Dravidian linguists such as Bhadriraju Krishnamurti.[46]
In the early 1970s, the linguist David McAlpin produced a detailed proposal of a genetic relationship between Dravidian and the extinct Elamite language of ancient Elam (present-day southwestern Iran).[47] The Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis was supported in the late 1980s by the archaeologist Colin Renfrew and the geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who suggested that Proto-Dravidian was brought to India by farmers from the Iranian part of the Fertile Crescent.[48][49] (In his 2000 book, Cavalli-Sforza suggested western India, northern India and northern Iran as alternative starting points.[50]) However, linguists have found McAlpin's cognates unconvincing and criticized his proposed phonological rules as ad hoc.[51][52][53] Elamite is generally believed by scholars to be a language isolate, and the theory has had no effect on studies of the language.[54]
Dravidian is one of the primary language families in the Nostratic proposal, which would link most languages in North Africa, Europe and Western Asia into a family with its origins in the Fertile Crescent sometime between the last Ice Age and the emergence of Proto-Indo-European 4,000–6,000 BCE. However, the general consensus is that such deep connections are not, or not yet, demonstrable.
The origins of the Dravidian languages, as well as their subsequent development and the period of their differentiation are unclear, partially due to the lack of comparative linguistic research into the Dravidian languages. Though some scholars have argued that the Dravidian languages may have been brought to India by migrations in the fourth or third millennium BCE[5][6] or even earlier,[7][8] the Dravidian languages cannot easily be connected to any other language, and they could well be indigenous to India.[9][note 1] Proto-Dravidian was spoken in the 4th or 3rd millennium BCE,[55][56] and it is thought that the Dravidian languages were the most widespread indigenous languages in the Indian subcontinent before the advance of the Indo-Aryan languages.[10]
As a proto-language, the Proto-Dravidian language is not itself attested in the historical record. Its modern conception is based solely on reconstruction. It was suggested in the 1980s that the language was spoken in the 4th millennium BCE, and started disintegrating into various branches around 3rd millennium BCE.[55] According to Krishnamurti, Proto-Dravidian may have been spoken in the Indus civilization, suggesting a 'tentative date of Proto-Dravidian around the early part of the third millennium.'[57] Krishnamurti further states that South Dravidian I (including pre-Tamil) and South Dravidian II (including Pre-Telugu) split around the eleventh century BCE, with the other major branches splitting off at around the same time.[58] Kolipakam et al. (2018) estimate the Dravidian language family to be approximately 4,500 years old.[56]
The Indus Valley civilisation (3,300–1,900 BCE), located in Northwestern Indian subcontinent, is often understood to have been Dravidian.[59] Already in 1924, when announcing the discovery of the IVC, John Marshall stated that (one of) the language(s) may have been Dravidic.[60] Cultural and linguistic similarities have been cited by researchers Henry Heras, Kamil Zvelebil, Asko Parpola and Iravatham Mahadevan as being strong evidence for a proto-Dravidian origin of the ancient Indus Valley civilisation.[61][62] The discovery in Tamil Nadu of a late Neolithic (early 2nd millennium BCE, i.e. post-dating Harappan decline) stone celt allegedly marked with Indus signs has been considered by some to be significant for the Dravidian identification.[63][64]
Yuri Knorozov surmised that the symbols represent a logosyllabic script and suggested, based on computer analysis, an underlying agglutinative Dravidian language as the most likely candidate for the underlying language.[65] Knorozov's suggestion was preceded by the work of Henry Heras, who suggested several readings of signs based on a proto-Dravidian assumption.[66]
Linguist Asko Parpola writes that the Indus script and Harappan language are 'most likely to have belonged to the Dravidian family'.[67] Parpola led a Finnish team in investigating the inscriptions using computer analysis. Based on a proto-Dravidian assumption, they proposed readings of many signs, some agreeing with the suggested readings of Heras and Knorozov (such as equating the 'fish' sign with the Dravidian word for fish, 'min') but disagreeing on several other readings. A comprehensive description of Parpola's work until 1994 is given in his book Deciphering the Indus Script.[68]
Although in modern times speakers of the various Dravidian languages have mainly occupied the southern portion of India, in earlier times they probably were spoken in a larger area. After the Indo-Aryan migrations into north-western India, starting ca. 1500 BCE, and the establishment of the Kuru kingdom ca. 1100 BCE, a process of Sanskritisation started, which resulted in a language shift in northern India. Southern India has remained majority Dravidian, but pockets of Dravidian can be found in central India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.
The Kurukh and Malto are pockets of Dravidian languages in central India, spoken by people who may have migrated from south India. They do have myths about external origins.[69] The Kurukh have traditionally claimed to be from the Deccan Peninsula,[70] more specifically Karnataka. The same tradition has existed of the Brahui,[71][72] who call themselves immigrants.[73] Holding this same view of the Brahui are many scholars [74] such as L.H. Horace Perera and M.Ratnasabapathy.[75]
The Brahui population of Pakistan's Balochistan province has been taken by some as the linguistic equivalent of a relict population, perhaps indicating that Dravidian languages were formerly much more widespread and were supplanted by the incoming Indo-Aryan languages.[76][77][78] However, it has been argued that the absence of any Old Iranian (Avestan) loanwords in Brahui suggests that the Brahui migrated to Balochistan from central India less than 1,000 years ago. The main Iranian contributor to Brahui vocabulary, Balochi, is a western Iranian language like Kurdish, and arrived in the area from the west only around 1,000AD.[79] Sound changes shared with Kurukh and Malto also suggest that Brahui was originally spoken near them in central India.[80]
Dravidian languages show extensive lexical (vocabulary) borrowing, but only a few traits of structural (either phonological or grammatical) borrowing from Indo-Aryan, whereas Indo-Aryan shows more structural than lexical borrowings from the Dravidian languages.[81] Many of these features are already present in the oldest known Indo-Aryan language, the language of the Rigveda (c.1500 BCE), which also includes over a dozen words borrowed from Dravidian.[82]
Vedic Sanskrit has retroflex consonants (ṭ/ḍ, ṇ) with about 88 words in the Rigveda having unconditioned retroflexes.[83][84] Some sample words are Iṭanta, Kaṇva, śakaṭī, kevaṭa, puṇya and maṇḍūka.Since other Indo-European languages, including other Indo-Iranian languages, lack retroflex consonants, their presence in Indo-Aryan is often cited as evidence of substrate influence from close contact of the Vedic speakers with speakers of a foreign language family rich in retroflex consonants.[83][84] The Dravidian family is a serious candidate since it is rich in retroflex phonemes reconstructible back to the Proto-Dravidian stage.[85][86][87]
In addition, a number of grammatical features of Vedic Sanskrit not found in its sister Avestan language appear to have been borrowed from Dravidian languages. These include the gerund, which has the same function as in Dravidian, and the quotative marker iti.[88] Some linguists explain this asymmetrical borrowing by arguing that Middle Indo-Aryan languages were built on a Dravidian substratum.[89] These scholars argue that the most plausible explanation for the presence of Dravidian structural features in Indic is language shift, that is, native Dravidian speakers learning and adopting Indic languages.[90] Although each of the innovative traits in Indic could be accounted for by internal explanations, early Dravidian influence is the only explanation that can account for all of the innovations at once; moreover, it accounts for several of the innovative traits in Indic better than any internal explanation that has been proposed.[91]
The most characteristic grammatical features of Dravidian languages are:[43]
Dravidian languages are noted for the lack of distinction between aspirated and unaspirated stops. While some Dravidian languages have accepted large numbers of loan words from Sanskrit and other Indo-Iranian languages in addition to their already vast vocabulary, in which the orthography shows distinctions in voice and aspiration, the words are pronounced in Dravidian according to different rules of phonology and phonotactics: aspiration of plosives is generally absent, regardless of the spelling of the word. This is not a universal phenomenon and is generally avoided in formal or careful speech, especially when reciting. For instance, Tamil does not distinguish between voiced and voiceless stops. In fact, the Tamil alphabet lacks symbols for voiced and aspirated stops. Dravidian languages are also characterized by a three-way distinction between dental, alveolar, and retroflex places of articulation as well as large numbers of liquids.
Proto-Dravidian had five short and long vowels: *a, *ā, *i, *ī, *u, *ū, *e, *ē, *o, *ō. There were no diphthongs; ai and au are treated as *ay and *av (or *aw).[92][86][93]The five-vowel system is largely preserved in the descendent subgroups.[94]
The following consonantal phonemes are reconstructed:[85][86][95]
Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Retroflex | Palatal | Velar | Glottal |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Plosives | *p | *t | *ṯ | *ṭ | *c | *k |
Nasals | *m | *n | *ṉ (??) | *ṇ | *ñ | |
Fricatives | (*H) | |||||
Flap/Rhotics | *r | *ẓ (ḻ, r̤) | ||||
Lateral | *l | *ḷ | ||||
Glides | *w [v] | *y |
The numerals from 1 to 10 in various Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages (here exemplified by Hindi, Sanskrit and Marathi).[96]
Number | Southern | South-Central | Central | Northern | Proto-Dravidian | Indo-Aryan | Iranian | |||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Tamil | Kannada | Malayalam | Kodava | Tulu | Telugu | Gondi | Kolami | Kurukh | Brahui | Hindi | Sanskrit | Marathi | Balochi | Persian | ||||
1 | oṉṟu | ondu | onnu | ond | onji | okaṭi | undi | okkod | oṇṭa | asiṭ | *onṯu 1 | ek | éka | ek | yak | yek | ||
2 | iraṇṭu | eraḍu | raṇḍu | danḍ | raḍḍ | renḍu | raṇḍ | irāṭ | indiŋ | irāṭ | *iraṇṭu 2 | do | dvi | don | do | do | ||
3 | mūṉṟu | mūṟu | mūnnu | mūṉd | mūji | mūḍu | muṇḍ | mūndiŋ | mūnd | musiṭ | *muH- | tīn | tri | tīn | sē | seh | ||
4 | nāṉku | nālku | nālu | nāl | nāl | nālugu | nāluṇg | nāliŋ | nāx | čār (II) | *nāl | cār | catúr | cār | cār | cahār | ||
5 | aintu | aidu | añcu | añji | ayN | ayidu | saiyuṇg | ayd 3 | pancē (II) | panč (II) | *cay-m- | panc | pañca | pātc | panc | panj | ||
6 | āru | āṟu | āṟu | ār | āji | āṟu | sāruṇg | ār 3 | soyyē (II) | šaš (II) | *cāṯu | che | ṣáṣ | sahā | śaś | śeś | ||
7 | ēẓu | ēlu | ēẓu | ēḻ | yēl | ēḍu | yeḍuṇg | ēḍ 3 | sattē (II) | haft (II) | *ēẓ | sāt | saptá | sāt | hapt, haft | haft | ||
8 | eṭṭu | eṇṭu | eṭṭu | eṭṭ | enma | enimidi | armur | enumadī 3 | aṭṭhē (II) | hašt (II) | *eṇṭṭu | āṭh | aṣṭá | āṭh | haśt | haśt | ||
9 | oṉpatu 5 | ombattu | ompatu 5 | oiymbad | ormba | tommidi | unmāk | tomdī 3 | naiṃyē (II) | nōh (II) | *toḷ/*toṇ | nau | náva | nau | nuo | noh | ||
10 | pattu | hattu | pattu | patt | patt | padi | pad | padī 3 | dassē (II) | dah (II) | *paH(tu) | das | dáśa | dahā | da | dah |
Four Dravidian languages, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu, have lengthy literary traditions.[97]Literature in Tulu and Kodava is more recent.[97]
The earliest known Dravidian inscriptions are 76 Old Tamil inscriptions on cave walls in Madurai and Tirunelveli districts in Tamil Nadu, dating from the 2nd century BCE.[13]These inscriptions are written in a variant of the Brahmi script called Tamil Brahmi.[98]The earliest long text in Old Tamil is the Tolkāppiyam, an early work on Tamil grammar and poetics, whose oldest layers could date from the 1st century BCE.[13]
.. together with the evidence of archaeology would seem to suggest that the original Dravidian-speakers entered India from Iran in the fourth millennium BC ..
.. More recently, about 15,000–10,000 years before present (ybp), when agriculture developed in the Fertile Crescent region that extends from Israel through northern Syria to western Iran, there was another eastward wave of human migration (Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994; Renfrew 1987), a part of which also appears to have entered India. This wave has been postulated to have brought the Dravidian languages into India (Renfrew 1987). Subsequently, the Indo-European (Aryan) language family was introduced into India about 4,000 ybp ..
.. The analysis of two Y chromosome variants, Hgr9 and Hgr3 provides interesting data (Quintan-Murci et al., 2001). Microsatellite variation of Hgr9 among Iranians, Pakistanis and Indians indicate an expansion of populations to around 9000 YBP in Iran and then to 6,000 YBP in India. This migration originated in what was historically termed Elam in south-west Iran to the Indus valley, and may have been associated with the spread of Dravidian languages from south-west Iran (Quintan-Murci et al., 2001). ..
It is generally accepted that Dravidian - with no identifiable cognates among the world's languages - was India's most widely distributed, indigenous language family when Indo-European speakers first intruded from the north-west 3,000 years ago
most scholars have taken the 'Dravidian hypothesis' seriously
Harappan language..prevailing theory indicates Dravidian origins
Hindi | |
---|---|
हिन्दी Hindī | |
Pronunciation | Hindi pronunciation: [ˈɦɪndiː] |
Native to | India |
Region | Northern, Eastern, Western and Central India (Hindi Belt) |
Ethnicity | No specific ethnicity[1][2] |
Native speakers | unknown; 322 million speakers of Hindustani and various related languages reported their language as 'Hindi' (2011 census)[3] L2 speakers: 270 million (2016)[4] |
Indo-European
| |
Vedic Sanskrit
| |
Devanagari Devanagari Braille | |
Signed Hindi | |
Official status | |
India | |
Recognised minority language in | |
Regulated by | Central Hindi Directorate[7] |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-1 | hi |
ISO 639-2 | hin |
ISO 639-3 | hin |
hin-hin | |
Glottolog | hind1269 [8] |
Linguasphere | 59-AAF-qf |
Hindi (Devanagari: हिन्दी, IAST: Hindī), or Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: मानक हिन्दी, IAST: Mānak Hindī) is a standardised and Sanskritisedregister[9] of the Hindustani language. Hindi, written in the Devanagari script, is one of the official languages of India, along with the English language.[10] It is one of the 22 scheduled languages of the Republic of India.[11] However, it is not the national language of India because no language was given such a status in the Indian constitution.[12][13]
Hindi is the lingua franca of the Hindi belt, and to a lesser extent other parts of India (usually in a simplified or pidginized variety such as Bazaar Hindustani or Haflong Hindi).[14][15] Outside India, several other languages are recognized officially as 'Hindi' but do not refer to the Standard Hindi language described here and instead descend from other dialects of Hindustani, such as Awadhi and Bhojpuri. Such languages include Fiji Hindi, which is official in Fiji,[16] and Caribbean Hindustani, which is a recognized language in Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Suriname.[17][18][19][20] Apart from specialized vocabulary, spoken Hindi is mutually intelligible with standard Urdu, another recognized register of Hindustani.
As a linguistic variety, Hindi is the fourth most-spoken first language in the world, after Mandarin, Spanish and English.[21] Alongside Urdu as Hindustani, it is the third most-spoken language in the world, after Mandarin and English.[22]
The term Hindī originally was used to refer to inhabitants of the region east of the Indus. It was borrowed from Classical PersianHindī (Iranian Persian Hendi), meaning 'Indian', from the proper noun Hind 'India'.[23]
The name Hindavī was used by Amir Khusrow in his poetry.[24][25]
Like other Indo-Aryan languages, Hindi is a direct descendant of an early form of Vedic Sanskrit, through Sauraseni Prakrit and Śauraseni Apabhraṃśa (from Sanskrit apabhraṃśa 'corrupted'), which emerged in the 7th century A.D.[26]
Modern Standard Hindi is based on the Khariboli dialect,[26] the vernacular of Delhi and the surrounding region, which came to replace earlier prestige dialects such as Awadhi, Maithili (sometimes regarded as separate from the Hindi dialect continuum) and Braj. Urdu – another form of Hindustani – acquired linguistic prestige in the later Mughal period (1800s), and underwent significant Persian influence. Modern Hindi and its literary tradition evolved towards the end of the 18th century.[27] However, modern Hindi's earlier literary stages before standardization can be traced to the 16th century.[28] In the late 19th century, a movement to further develop Hindi as a standardised form of Hindustani separate from Urdu took form.[29] In 1881, Bihar accepted Hindi as its sole official language, replacing Urdu, and thus became the first state of India to adopt Hindi.[30] Modern Standard Hindi is one of the youngest Indian languages in this regard.
After independence, the government of India instituted the following conventions:[original research?]
On 14 September 1949, the Constituent Assembly of India adopted Hindi written in the Devanagari script as the official language of the Republic of India replacing Urdu's previous usage in British India.[31][32][33] To this end, several stalwarts rallied and lobbied pan-India in favor of Hindi, most notably Beohar Rajendra Simha along with Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, Kaka Kalelkar, Maithili Sharan Gupt and Seth Govind Das who even debated in Parliament on this issue. As such, on the 50th birthday of Beohar Rajendra Simha on 14 September 1949, the efforts came to fruition following the adoption of Hindi as the official language.[34] Now, it is celebrated as Hindi Day.[35]
In Northeast India a pidgin known as Haflong Hindi has developed as a lingua franca for various tribes in Assam that speak other languages natively.[36] In Arunachal Pradesh, Hindi emerged as a lingua franca among locals who speak over 50 dialects natively.[37]
Part XVII of the Indian Constitution deals with the official language of the Indian Commonwealth. Under Article 343, the official languages of the Union has been prescribed, which includes Hindi in Devanagari script and English:
(1) The official language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagari script. The form of numerals to be used for the official purposes of the Union shall be the international form of Indian numerals.[17]
(2) Notwithstanding anything in clause (1), for a period of fifteen years from the commencement of this Constitution, the English language shall continue to be used for all the official purposes of the Union for which it was being used immediately before such commencement: Provided that the President may, during the said period, by order authorize the use of the Hindi language in addition to the English language and of the Devanagari form of numerals in addition to the international form of Indian numerals for any of the official purposes of the Union.[38]
Article 351 of the Indian constitution states
It shall be the duty of the Union to promote the spread of the Hindi language, to develop it so that it may serve as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India and to secure its enrichment by assimilating without interfering with its genius, the forms, style and expressions used in Hindustani and in the other languages of India specified in the Eighth Schedule, and by drawing, wherever necessary or desirable, for its vocabulary, primarily on Sanskrit and secondarily on other languages.
It was envisioned that Hindi would become the sole working language of the Union Government by 1965 (per directives in Article 344 (2) and Article 351),[39] with state governments being free to function in the language of their own choice. However, widespread resistance to the imposition of Hindi on non-native speakers, especially in South India (such as the those in Tamil Nadu) led to the passage of the Official Languages Act of 1963, which provided for the continued use of English indefinitely for all official purposes, although the constitutional directive for the Union Government to encourage the spread of Hindi was retained and has strongly influenced its policies.[40]
Article 344 (2b) stipulates that official language commission shall be constituted every ten years to recommend steps for progressive use of Hindi language and imposing restrictions on the use of the English language by the union government. In practice, the official language commissions are constantly endeavouring to promote Hindi but not imposing restrictions on English in official use by the union government.
At the state level, Hindi is the official language of the following Indian states: Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and West Bengal.[41][42] Each may also designate a 'co-official language'; in Uttar Pradesh, for instance, depending on the political formation in power, this language is generally Urdu. Similarly, Hindi is accorded the status of official language in the following Union Territories: Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Chandigarh, Dadra & Nagar Haveli, Daman & Diu, National Capital Territory.
National language status for Hindi is a long-debated theme. In 2010, the Gujarat High Court clarified that Hindi is not the national language of India because the constitution does not mention it as such.[12][13][43]
Outside Asia, the Awadhi language (A Hindi dialect) with influence from Bhojpuri, Bihari languages, Fijian and English is spoken in Fiji.[44][45] It is an official language in Fiji as per the 1997 Constitution of Fiji,[46] where it referred to it as 'Hindustani', however in the 2013 Constitution of Fiji, it is simply called 'Fiji Hindi'.[47] It is spoken by 380,000 people in Fiji.[44]
Hindi is also spoken by a large population of Madheshis (people having roots in north-India but have migrated to Nepal over hundreds of years) of Nepal. Hindi is quite easy to understand for many Pakistanis, who speak Urdu, which, like Hindi, is part of Hindustani. Apart from this, Hindi is spoken by the large Indian diaspora which hails from, or has its origin from the 'Hindi Belt' of India. A substantially large North Indian diaspora lives in countries like the United States of America, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, South Africa, Fiji and Mauritius, where it is natively spoken at home and among their own Hindustani-speaking communities. Outside India, Hindi speakers are 8 million in Nepal; 863,077 in United States of America;[48][49] 450,170 in Mauritius; 380,000 in Fiji;[44] 250,292 in South Africa; 150,000 in Suriname;[50] 100,000 in Uganda; 45,800 in United Kingdom;[51] 20,000 in New Zealand; 20,000 in Germany; 26,000 in Trinidad and Tobago;[50] 3,000 in Singapore.
Linguistically, Hindi and Urdu are two registers of the same language and are mutually intelligible.[52] Hindi is written in the Devanagari script and uses more Sanskrit words, whereas Urdu is written in the Perso-Arabic script and uses more Arabic and Persian words. Hindi is the most commonly used official language in India. Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan and is one of 22 official languages of India.
The comparison of Hindi and Urdu as separate languages is largely motivated by politics, namely the Indo-Pakistani rivalry.[53]
Hindi is written in the Devanagari script, an abugida. Devanagari consists of 11 vowels and 33 consonants and is written from left to right. Unlike for Sanskrit, Devanagari is not entirely phonetic for Hindi, especially failing to mark schwa dropping in spoken Standard Hindi.[54]
The Government of India uses Hunterian transliteration as its official system of writing Hindi in the Latin script. Various other systems also exist, such as IAST, ITRANS and ISO 15919.
Traditionally, Hindi words are divided into five principal categories according to their etymology:
Hindi also makes extensive use of loan translation (calqueing) and occasionally phono-semantic matching of English.[58]
Hindi has naturally inherited a large portion of its vocabulary from Śaurasenī Prākṛt, in the form of tadbhava words. This process usually involves compensatory lengthening of vowels preceding consonant clusters in Prakrit, e.g. Sanskrit tīkṣṇa > Prakrit tikkha > Hindi tīkhā.
Much of Modern Standard Hindi's vocabulary is borrowed from Sanskrit as tatsam borrowings, especially in technical and academic fields. The formal Hindi standard, from which much of the Persian, Arabic and English vocabulary has been replaced by neologisms compounding tatsam words, is called Śuddh Hindi (pure Hindi), and is viewed as a more prestigious dialect over other more colloquial forms of Hindi.
Excessive use of tatsam words sometimes creates problems for native speakers. They may have Sanskrit consonant clusters which do not exist in native Hindi, causing difficulties in pronunciation.[59]
As a part of the process of Sanskritization, new words are coined using Sanskrit components to be used as replacements for supposedly foreign vocabulary. Usually these neologisms are calques of English words already adopted into spoken Hindi. Some terms such as dūrbhāṣ 'telephone', literally 'far-speech' and dūrdarśan 'television', literally 'far-sight' have even gained some currency in formal Hindi in the place of the English borrowings (ṭeli)fon and ṭīvī.[60]
Hindi also features significant Persian influence, standardised from spoken Hindustani.[61][page needed] Early borrowings, beginning in the mid-12th century, were specific to Islam (e.g. Muhammad, islām) and so Persian was simply an intermediary for Arabic. Later, under the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire, Persian became the primary administrative language in the Hindi heartland. Persian borrowings reached a heyday in the 17th century, pervading all aspects of life. Even grammatical constructs, namely the izafat, were assimilated into Hindi.[62]
Post-Partition the Indian government advocated for a policy of Sanskritization leading to a marginalization of the Persian element in Hindi. However, many Persian words (e.g. muśkil 'difficult', bas 'enough', havā 'air', x(a)yāl 'thought') have remained entrenched in Modern Standard Hindi, and a larger amount are still used in Urdu poetry written in the Devanagari script.
Arabic also shows influence in Hindi, often via Persian but sometimes directly.[63]
Hindi literature is broadly divided into four prominent forms or styles, being Bhakti (devotional – Kabir, Raskhan); Śṛṇgār (beauty – Keshav, Bihari); Vīgāthā (epic); and Ādhunik (modern).
Medieval Hindi literature is marked by the influence of Bhakti movement and the composition of long, epic poems. It was primarily written in other varieties of Hindi, particularly Avadhi and Braj Bhasha, but to a degree also in Khariboli, the basis for Modern Standard Hindi. During the British Raj, Hindustani became the prestige dialect.
Chandrakanta, written by Devaki Nandan Khatri in 1888, is considered the first authentic work of prose in modern Hindi.[64] The person who brought realism in the Hindi prose literature was Munshi Premchand, who is considered as the most revered figure in the world of Hindi fiction and progressive movement. Literary, or Sāhityik, Hindi was popularised by the writings of Swami Dayananda Saraswati, Bhartendu Harishchandra and others. The rising numbers of newspapers and magazines made Hindustani popular with the educated people.[citation needed]
The Dvivedī Yug ('Age of Dwivedi') in Hindi literature lasted from 1900 to 1918. It is named after Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi, who played a major role in establishing Modern Standard Hindi in poetry and broadening the acceptable subjects of Hindi poetry from the traditional ones of religion and romantic love.
In the 20th century, Hindi literature saw a romantic upsurge. This is known as Chāyāvād (shadow-ism) and the literary figures belonging to this school are known as Chāyāvādī. Jaishankar Prasad, Suryakant Tripathi 'Nirala', Mahadevi Varma and Sumitranandan Pant, are the four major Chāyāvādī poets.
Uttar Ādhunik is the post-modernist period of Hindi literature, marked by a questioning of early trends that copied the West as well as the excessive ornamentation of the Chāyāvādī movement, and by a return to simple language and natural themes.
The Hindi Wikipedia was the first Indian-language wiki to reach 100,000 articles. Hindi literature, music, and film have all been disseminated via the internet. In 2015, Google reported a 94% increase in Hindi-content consumption year-on-year, adding that 21% of users in India prefer content in Hindi.[65]
Many Hindi newspapers also offer digital editions.
The following is a sample text in High Hindi, of the Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (by the United Nations):
Hindi edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
Wikivoyage has a phrasebook for Hindi. |
The History of India covers thousands of years and discusses many diverse languages, cultures, periods, and dynasties. It may be divided in the following parts:
Remains (stone tools and a skull) in central India show presence of an early species of man, Homo erectus.[1]Archeologists think they lived in India between 200,000 and 500,000 years ago. This period is known as the paleolithic era.
The earliest archaeological site in the subcontinent is the paleolithic hominid site in the Soan River valley.[2] Soanian sites are found in the Sivalik region across India, Pakistan and Nepal.[3]
Modern humans (Homo sapiens) settled in the Indian subcontinent at least 12,000 years ago. At that time the last ice age had just ended and climate became warm and dry. First settlements of human beings in India are found in Bhimbetka, a place near Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh, India). Mesolithic people lived on hunting, fishing and food gathering.
Neolithic agriculture sprang up in the Indus Valley region around 7000 years ago, in the lower Gangetic valley around 5000 years ago. Later, in South India, agriculture spread southwards and also into Malwa around 3800 years ago.
The Bronze Age in the Indian subcontinent began around 5300 years ago with the early Indus Valley Civilisation, which included cities such as Harappa, Mohenjodaro, Lothal, and Kalibanga. The civilization was based on the Indus River and its tributaries, extending into the Ghaggar-Hakra River valley,[4] the Ganges-Yamuna Doab,[5]Gujarat,[6] and southeastern Afghanistan.[7] Today, the civilization's old territory is split between India and Pakistan. In Pakistan, the provinces of Sindh, Punjab, and Balochistan overlap with ex-Indus Valley territory. In India, the provinces Gujarat, Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan also share territory with the Indus Valley Civilization.
The first cities on the Indian subcontinent were part of the Indus Valley Civilisation.[8] They made the Indus Valley Civilization similar to early Mesopotamian civilisations and Ancient Egypt.[9] Inhabitants of the ancient Indus river valley, the Harappans, developed new techniques in metallurgy and handicraft (carneol products, seal carving), and produced copper, bronze, lead, and tin.
The mature Indus civilization flourished from about 4600 to 3900 years ago. The civilization included urban centers such as Dholavira, Kalibanga, Ropar, Rakhigarhi, and Lothal in modern-day India, and Harappa, Ganeriwala, and Mohenjo-daro in modern-day Pakistan. The cities were built of brick, with roadside drainage system and multistoried houses.
During the later period of this civilisation, signs of a gradual decline began to emerge. By about 3700 years ago, most of the cities were abandoned. However, the Indus Valley Civilisation did not disappear suddenly. Some parts of the Indus Civilization may have survived in the smaller villages and isolated farms.
The Vedas are the oldest teachings of India, though the transmission of these teachings was mainly oral until around the 5th century. There are four Vedas, and the first one is the Rigveda. As per Rigveda the whole regions in which the Aryans were first settled in India was called as the Land of 7 Rivers or SaptaSindhawa .The other three are Samveda, Yajurveda and Atharvaveda. The Vedas have verses in praise of gods and others. They also have other information. At that time, the society was pastoral.
After the Rigveda, society became more agricultural. People became divided into four classes depending on the type of the work. Brahmins were priests and teachers. Kshatriyas were the warriors. Vaishyas did agriculture, trading and commerce. The shudras were the general working class. A common misconception is that the Vaishyas and Shudras were generally looked down upon, and treated badly by Brahmins and Kshatriyas, which was true for the later part of the Vedic age. But was untrue for the earlier part. This type of social division is called the Varna system in Hinduism.
During the period of the Vedic civilization, there were many Aryan clans and tribes. Some of them combined and became bigger like the kingdom of the Kurus.
Around the 5th century BC, north-western parts of India faced invasion by the Achaemenid Empire and by the Greeks of Alexander the Great. A Persian way of thinking, administration and lifestyle came to India. This influence became bigger during the Mauryan dynasty.
From around 520 BC, the Achaemenid Empire’s Darius I ruled large part of northwestern parts of the Indian subcontinent.Alexander later conquered these areas. Achaemenid rule lasted about 186 years. In modern times, there are still traces of this Greek heritage to be found in parts of northwestern India.
Greco-Buddhism (also spelled as Græco-Buddhism) is a combination of the cultures of Greece and Buddhism. This mixture of cultures continued to develop for 800 years, from the 4th century BC until the 5th century AD. The area where it happened is modern day’s Afghanistan and Pakistan. This mixture of cultures influenced Mahayana Buddhism and spread of Buddhism to China, Korea, Japan and Tibet.
The Magadha formed one of the sixteen kingdoms in ancient India. The core of the kingdom was the area of Bihar south of the Ganges. Its first capital was Rajagriha (modern Rajgir) then Pataliputra (modern Patna).
Magadha expanded to include most of Bihar and Bengal,[10] followed by much of eastern Uttar Pradesh and Odhishaa. The ancient kingdom of Magadha is mentioned in Jain and Buddhist texts. It was also mentioned in the Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, .[11] The state of Magadha, possibly a tribal kingdom, is recorded in Vedic texts much earlier than 600 BC.
Magadha played an important role in the development of Jainism and Buddhism, and two of India's greatest empires, the Maurya Empire and Gupta Empire, originated from Magadha. These empires saw advances in ancient India's science, mathematics, astronomy, religion, and philosophy. This was the Indian 'Golden Age'.
The Satavahanas came to power from around 230 BC. They are also called Andhras. For about 450 years, many Satavahanas kings ruled most parts of the southern and central India.
For about 350 years, from the years 35-405, Saka kings ruled India. They ruled the western and central parts of India. These areas are in today's states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh. There were 27 independent rulers, collectively known as the Kshatrapas.
Saka kings ruled India along aside the Kushan kings and the Satvahana kings. Kushan kings ruled the northern parts of India. Satvahana kings ruled the central and some of the southern parts of India.
Indo-Scythians came to India from Siberia passing through several places like Bactria, Sogdiana, Kashmir and Arachosia. Their coming to India continued from the 2nd century BC to the 1st century BC. They defeated the Indo-Greek rulers of India, and ruled India from Gandhara to Mathura.
The Gupta dynasty reigned from around 320 to 550 AD. The Gupta Empire covered most of North-central India, and what is now western India and Bangladesh. Gupta society was ordered in accordance with Hindu beliefs. The time of the Gupta Empire is seen as the Golden Age of India. Historians place the Gupta dynasty alongside the Han Dynasty, Tang Dynasty and Roman Empire as a model of a classical civilization.
By the first half of the fifth century, a group of people known as Huns had settled in Afghanistan. They became powerful. They made Bamiyan as their capital city. They started attacking northwestern parts of India. Skandagupta, an emperor of the Gupta dynasty fought back and kept them away for some years. At last the Huns won and could enter most parts of northern India. With this the Gupta dynasty came to an end. Most of north India became badly affected by this invasion. However, Huns could not go up to the Deccan Plateau and the southern parts of India. These parts remained peaceful. No one knows definitely about the fate of Huns after the end of the sixth century. Some historians believe that they mixed up fully with the Indian people of that time.
In the history of India, Middle kingdoms of India covers a period beginning from around the 6th-7th century. In South India, Chola kings ruled Tamil Nadu, and Chera kings ruled Kerala. They also had trading relationships with the Roman Empire to the west and Southeast Asia to the east. In north India, Rajputs ruled in many kingdoms. Some of those kingdoms continued for hundreds of years.
After the collapse of the Gupta Empire, it was Harsha of Kanauj (a place now in Uttar Pradesh state of India) who united the northern parts of India in one kingdom. After his death several dynasties tried to control north India and ruled from time to time from 7th century till the 9th century as described in some of the sections below. Some of these dynasties were the Pratiharas of Malwa and later Kannauj; the Palas of Bengal, and the Rashtrakutas of the Deccan.
The Pratihara kings ruled kingdoms in Rajasthan and some other parts of northern India from the 6th century to the 11th century. The Palas ruled the eastern part of India. They ruled over areas which are now parts of the Indian states of Bihar, Jharkhand, and the west Bengal, and of Bangladesh. The Palas ruled from 8th century to the 12th century. In the southern parts of India, Rashtrakutas of Malakheda (Karnataka) ruled the Deccan during the 8th-10th centuries after the end of Chalukya rule. All these three dynasties always tried to control the entire north India. During all this time lasting for three to four hundred years, the Chola kings were growing in power and influence.
In the 6th century several Rajput kingdoms came into being in Rajasthan. Many other Rajput kings ruled in different parts of north India. Some of these kingdoms continue to survive for hundreds of years during different periods of the history of India.
In 1336, two brothers named Harihara and Bukka founded the Vijayanagara Empire in an area which is now in Karnataka state of India. The most famous king of this empire was Krishnadevaraya. In 1565, rulers of this empire were defeated in a battle. But, the empire continued for about next one hundred years.
A number of kingdoms of south India had trading relations with the Arabs in the west, and with Indonesia and other countries of the east.
Islam spread across the Indian subcontinent over a period of 500 years. In the 10th and 11th centuries, Turks and Afghans invaded India and established sultanates in Delhi. Pes 2002 download. In the early 16th century, descendants of Genghis Khan swept across the Khyber Pass and established the Mughal Empire, which lasted for 200 years. From the 11th to the 15th centuries, southern India was dominated by Hindu Chola and Vijayanagar Dynasties. During this time, the two systems—the prevailing Hindu and Muslim—mingled, left lasting cultural influences on each other.
The Delhi sultanate was a Muslim kingdom based mostly in Delhi. It ruled large parts of the Indian subcontinent for 320 years (1206–1526) Five dynasties ruled over Delhi Sultanate. They are the mamaluk, khilji, tughlaq, sayyid and the lodi dynasties. The mamluk dynasty was started by Qutbuddin Aibak. He was a slave and thus this dynasty is also called Slave Dynasty. Qutubuddin Aibak also made Qutub minar. His son in law, Iltutmish became the ruler after Qutubuddin aibak. He completed the qutub minar.
The Kingdom of Mysore was a kingdom of southern India. People known as Wodeyars founded this kingdom in the year 1400. Later on, Hyder Ali and his son, Tipu Sultan, fought with the Wodeyar rulers. They also fought with the forces of the British Raj, but were defeated. Under the British Raj, Wodeyar kings continued to rule a large part of Karnataka. When India became independent on 15th August 1947, Wodeyars’ kingdom chose to become a part of India.
Guru Nanak founded Sikhism and his followers were called Sikhs. The power of Sikhs continued to increase in the northwestern part of India. The Sikhs became rulers of large part of the northwestern India. This is called the Sikh Kingdom or Empire. Ranjit Singh was the most famous ruler of the Sikh Empire. He expanded the borders of the Sikh Empire and at the time of his death, this empire covered areas of Punjab, and present day Kashmir and parts of Pakistan. The Sikhs and forces of the British Raj fought many wars. Till Maharaja Ranjit Singh was alive, Britishers were not able to cross the Sutlej river. After his death, the they took over the entire Punjab after battles with disorganised Sikh troops.
For a short period, a person named Ahmed Shah Durrani the founder of Afghanistan ruled some parts of northwestern India. Historians have named his rule as the Durrani Empire. In 1748, he crossed the Indus River and attacked Lahore, now a part of Pakistan. He also attacked many parts of Punjab. Then, he attacked Delhi. At that time, Delhi was the capital of the Mughal Empire. He took many valuable things from India. This included the Peacock Throne of Shah Jahan and the famous diamond named Kohinoor.
Colonial period means the time when Western countries ruled India. Western countries also ruled many other countries of Asia, Africa, and South America.
Starting in the 1600s the British East India Company began a very profitable trading empire in India, centered in Bengal. In the mid-1700s Robert Clive (1725-1774) led the Company to an expanded influence in India with victories over the French, the Bengalis, and the Mughals. With a victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 Clive became the first British Governor of Bengal.
In the hundred years after the battle, the East India Company conquered the entire subcontinent of India. They did this by trade, political intrigue, and direct military action. The British were very efficient administrators of their domains. But in 1857 the Indian Mutiny almost destroyed the Company's rule of India. Afterward the British government took control away from the Company. In 1858, India became a part of the British Empire and Queen Victoria became the empress of India.
For ninety years the British ruled India and Burma as a unified territory under the British king or queen. It was divided into eight provinces each with a governor. These provinces were Burma, Bengal, Madras, Bombay, UP, Central Provinces, Punjab, and Assam. A Governor-General (Viceroy) in Calcutta was head of the government.
The way the British conquered India was often divide and rule. In the end, many kingdoms were defeated by the British and the riches taken. For example, many of the Royal Crown Jewels were taken from previous kingdoms in India- including the Koh-I-Noor diamond (one of the worlds largest diamonds) and also stole many other large diamonds and gold.
During famines and floods many people died because the government did not help enough. Any Indian not able to pay the British taxes could be forced into prison and/or publicly beaten. Political opponents were jailed and sometimes killed for speaking out against colonial rule. After taking much of India's natural resources for hundreds of years, England was criticized for not protecting Indians during the partition of India and Pakistan. During the partition of India and Pakistan, millions of Indians and Pakistanis died.
The British also did good things. They built railroads, telegraphs and telephones, improved trade, standardized laws, and water supplies. Many of these things were done to help improve commerce in India and taxes provided to England. They created the Indian Civil Service for administering rules and regulations. They also tried to eliminate practices like burning widows.
The British ruled India primarily for the economic benefit of Britain. India produced cheap raw materials for British industry. Indians had to buy British manufactured goods and profits went back to Britain.
Many people in India wanted to be free from British rule. The struggle for independence was long and difficult. Many people protested against the British, and the British tortured many. They had long promoted divisions among the various Indian rulers and religions.
Because Hindus and Muslims fought each other, India was divided into two countries: Pakistan and India. Pakistan was also divided, decades later. The most important leader of the struggle for independence was Mohandas K. Gandhi. Gandhi believed in a non-violent opposition towards the British.
India won its independence, along with Muslim Pakistan, and became a free country on August 15, 1947. Pakistan won independence on 14 August, some hours before India.
On 15 August 1947, British Indian Empire was partitioned into two countries, India (Hindustan) and Pakistan. With this the British Raj in the Indian subcontinent ended. On 26 January 1950, Hindustan adopted a constitution. From that day, Hindustanis became the Republic of India or Indians.
During last 60 years, Republic of India has seen different stages in its national life. Some of them are as follows:
Presently (As of 2018), India is currently the fifth largest economy in terms of gross GDP. It is the 4th largest economy of the world when accounting for purchasing power parity. Some economists think that in coming decades, India’s economy will become still larger.
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