Write about the linguistic diversity of India?

India is a land of great diversity in terms of aspects ranging from history to geography, language to literature, culture to religion. Hindi is spoken by 40% of the country’s population. It was, therefore, considered as the official language by the Constitution in the first place.

Besides Hindi, there are 21 languages that the constitution recognizes as Scheduled Languages. The Census of 2001 recorded more than 1500 distinct languages that people in the country mentioned as their mother tongues. These languages were grouped to form some major languages. Even after this grouping, there were enlisted 114 major languages spoken throughout the country.

At present, 22 languages are termed under the category of Scheduled Languages as per the constitution. The others are called non-Scheduled Languages.