Languages

Many people around the world believe that India only has one language: Indian.  Truth be told, there are 22 official languages spoken in India.  They are written in 13 different scripts with over 720 dialects.  The official spoken languages in India are Hindi and English.  Hindi is taught to kids in school all over the country.

The list of some of the Indian languages includes:

• Sanskrit
• Hindi
• English
• Gujarati - Language of Gujarat and Union Territories of Dadar and Nagar Haveli
• Punjabi - The official language of Punjab
• Bengali- The state language of West Bengal
• Assamese - Official language of Assam
• Dogri, Urdu - The language of Jammu and Kashmir
• Oriya - The state language of state of Odisha
• Marathi - Language of Maharashtra
• Kannada - The official language of Karnataka
• Tamil - The state language of Tamil Nadu
• Telugu - It is the official language of Andhra Pradesh.
• Malayalam - It is the official language of Kerala
• Sindhi
• Konkani - The state language of Goa
• Manipuri - The official language of Manipur
• Khasi - The official language of Meghalaya
• Mizo - The official language of Mizoram

 Hindi is spoken in north and central India.  It is harder for speakers to understand each other in Hindi as the distance between regions becomes further.  There is a greater diversity of language in South India and it is harder to get along speaking in Hindi.

 Languages differ between Bangalore, Madras, and Hyderabad, so English can come in as pretty useful.  The main languages of South India are Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada.  There pronunciation and shifts in meaning are slightly different from Hindi as some of the vocabulary was borrowed from the mother language.

You may hear some people from north India say that they speak Urdu.  Basically, Urdu and Hindi are the same language. There is only one main difference between the two.  Hindi uses the Sanskrit based Devanagari script, while Urdu uses the Perso-Arabic script.

 Many people speak using Hinglish, which is exactly what it sounds like.  It is a mix of Hindi and English. The main difference between Hinglish and British English is the pronunciation of words.