Indian Language Trivia & World Language Charts
- Eniokos
- Jun 6, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Feb 9
Some amazing facts about Indian languages:
India has among the highest linguistic diversity in the world
India is home to hundreds of living languages, making it one of the most linguistically diverse countries globally. Estimates vary, but modern surveys list more than 400 languages currently spoken.
Indian languages belong to multiple unrelated language families
Languages spoken in India are classified into several major families: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austroasiatic (Munda and Mon-Khmer), and Sino-Tibetan (Tibeto-Burman), along with smaller groups and isolates.
Most Indians speak a language from the Indo-Aryan group
A large majority of India’s population speaks languages belonging to the Indo-Aryan subgroup of the Indo-European family, including Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and others.
Dravidian languages have a completely different structure from Indo-Aryan
Dravidian languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam exhibit grammatical and phonological systems distinct from Indo-Aryan languages, including agglutinative morphology.
Agglutinative morphology is a way a language builds words by adding clear, separate suffixes (or prefixes) to a root, where each added part has one specific meaning or grammatical function. One word = root + many small meaning-units, where each unit stays unchanged and is easy to identify. Meanings do not merge together. Most Dravidian languages (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam) are agglutinative.
Some Indian languages have ancient roots distinct from Sanskrit
While Sanskrit influenced many Indian languages culturally and lexically, languages such as Tamil and the Munda languages have independent long histories that predate extensive Sanskrit influence.
Ancient Indian inscriptions were often in vernacular Prakrits
Middle Indo-Aryan dialects known collectively as Prakrits were used in many of the earliest inscriptions (e.g., Ashokan edicts), showing early vernacular stages separate from classical Sanskrit.
Gāndhārī, an ancient Prakrit, spread well beyond South Asia
The language of the old Gandhāra region (northwest Indian subcontinent) was used in Buddhist texts and inscriptions found across Central Asia to China, indicating historical linguistic influence beyond modern Indian borders.
Some lesser-known languages retain historic scripts
Languages like Saurashtra, an Indo-Aryan language in southern India, have their own script of Brahmic origin, although other scripts such as Tamil or Devanagari are also used today.
Sanskrit’s grammar aligns with early Indo-European languages
Comparative linguistics shows that Sanskrit shares key grammatical features with other early Indo-European languages such as Greek and Latin, reflecting common ancestral structures.
India’s census distinguishes defined language families but many dialects exist
Official classifications group languages into broad families, but within each family are myriad dialects and speech varieties that may be linguistically distinct despite being labelled under one language name.
If you want to know more about world language trees, some interesting language tree charts linked in this blog post by Dan: https://www.angmohdan.com/the-root-of-all-human-languages/
More interesting comparisons at "The world’s languages captured in 6 charts"
The links between Sanskrit and other world languages are particularly interesting to me.
Related information can be found here:
A table listing some terms shared by Sanskrit and some other languages is available on Britannica:
Down the rabbit hole:
Sir William Jones (1746–1794) was the first person to emphatically point out the similarities between Sanskrit with both Greek and Latin. Sir Jones was a British philologist, Orientalist, and jurist, known for his pioneering work in the field of comparative linguistics. His contributions laid the groundwork for the modern study of Indo-European languages. Subsequently, linguists expanded on his observations in the 19th century, establishing the connections between these languages and extending the family to include Slavic, Baltic, and other linguistic groups.
Sir Jones was also the first to propose the concept of an "Aryan invasion," which is no longer supported by experts. Funny thing is that, although his hypothesis on the link between these languages later led to the idea of the ancestor language called "Proto-Indo-European," but his work didn't include Hindi as one of the Indo-European languages!
