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Multilingualism, literacy and communication
Differentiate mother tongue, additional languages, reading ability and the audience a service needs to reach.
Scheduled language groups by mother-tongue population, Census 2011
2011. Census 2011 persons classified by reported mother tongue; shares use India’s total population.
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| Place or category | Valuepeople | Share% |
|---|---|---|
| Hindi | 528,347,193 | 43.63% |
| Bengali | 97,237,669 | 8.03% |
| Marathi | 83,026,680 | 6.86% |
| Telugu | 81,127,740 | 6.7% |
| Tamil | 69,026,881 | 5.7% |
| Gujarati | 55,492,554 | 4.58% |
| Urdu | 50,772,631 | 4.19% |
| Kannada | 43,706,512 | 3.61% |
| Odia | 37,521,324 | 3.1% |
| Malayalam | 34,838,819 | 2.88% |
| Punjabi | 33,124,726 | 2.74% |
| Assamese | 15,311,351 | 1.26% |
| Maithili | 13,583,464 | 1.12% |
| Santali | 7,368,192 | 0.61% |
| Kashmiri | 6,797,587 | 0.56% |
| Nepali | 2,926,168 | 0.24% |
| Sindhi | 2,772,264 | 0.23% |
| Dogri | 2,596,767 | 0.21% |
| Konkani | 2,256,502 | 0.19% |
| Manipuri | 1,761,079 | 0.15% |
| Bodo | 1,482,929 | 0.12% |
| Sanskrit | 24,821 | Not available |
C-16 classifies mother-tongue returns; it does not measure everyone who can speak a language, bilingual ability, preferred advertising language, reading proficiency or ethnicity. The Hindi language-group total includes multiple mother tongues grouped under Hindi. It is different from the narrower Hindi mother-tongue entry. Only the 22 scheduled language groups are in this ranking. The full publication contains 121 language groups and also explains grouped, unclassified and small returns. Sanskrit’s percentage is marked N in the source, not zero.
Original source table ↗ · Statement 4, printed p.15 / PDF p.17
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