Language Families of India

A language family is a group of languages descended from a common ancestral language. Indian languages are commonly grouped into four major families: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman. This is a genealogical classification based on linguistic relationship, not on script, religion, region or official status.

Major language families

• The Indo-Aryan languages form a branch of the Indo-European family and include Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Assamese, Odia, Urdu, Kashmiri, Konkani, Sindhi and Nepali.
• The Dravidian family includes Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, besides languages such as Gondi and Kurukh.
• The Austroasiatic family is represented mainly by Munda languages such as Santali, Mundari and Ho, and by Khasi and related languages.
• The Tibeto-Burman languages, generally placed within the Sino-Tibetan family, include Bodo, Manipuri, Mizo and several languages spoken in the Himalayan and northeastern regions.

Distribution and interaction

Indo-Aryan languages predominate across much of northern, western, central and eastern India, while Dravidian languages predominate in peninsular India. Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman languages are concentrated largely among particular tribal and northeastern populations, although migration makes every linguistic region internally diverse.

• Long contact among language communities has produced extensive borrowing, bilingualism and shared linguistic features across family boundaries.
• A common script does not establish common ancestry: languages from different families may use related scripts, while members of one family may use different scripts.

Constitutional recognition

The Eighth Schedule to the Constitution lists 22 languages, but it does not classify them into language families. Scheduled status is a constitutional recognition, whereas family membership concerns historical linguistic descent.

• Most scheduled languages are Indo-Aryan, while the Schedule also includes four Dravidian languages, Santali from Austroasiatic, and Bodo and Manipuri from Tibeto-Burman.