SCHEDULED LANGUAGES IN DESCENDING ORDER OF SPEAKERS' STRENGTH - 2001
Persons who returned the language as their mother tongue & percentage to
total population of India ** .
Hindi has the highest number of mother tongue speakers. Konknni comes in
the 18th place with 0.24% of Indians use it as their mother tongue. Sanskrit
is least used as a mother tongue.
1 Hindi 422,048,642 (41.03 %)
2 Bengali 83,369,769 (8.11 %)
3 Telugu 74,002,856 (7.19 %)
4 Marathi 71,936,894 (6.99 %)
5 Tamil 60,793,814 (5.91 %)
6 Urdu 51,536,111 (5.01 %)
7 Gujarati 46,091,617 (4.48 %)
8 Kannada 37,924,011 (3.69 %)
9 Malayalam 33,066,392 (3.21 %)
10 Oriya 33,017,446 (3.21%)
11 Punjabi 29,102,477 (2.83 %)
12 Assamese 13,168,484 (1.28 %)
13 Maithili 12,179,122 (1.18 %)
14 Santali 6,469,600 (0.63 %)
15 Kashmiri 5,527,698 (0.54%)
16 Nepali 2,871,749 (0.28%)
17 Sindhi 2,535,485 (0.25 %)
18 Konkani 2,489,015 (0.24%)
19 Dogri 2,282,589 (0.22 %)
20 Manipuri * 1,466,705 (0.14 %)
21 Bodo 1,350,478 (0.13 %)
22 Sanskrit 14,135 (N )
* Excludes figures of Paomata, Mao-Maram and Purul sub-divisions of
Senapati district of Manipur for 2001.
** The percentage of speakers of each language for 2001 has been worked out
on the total population of India excluding the population of Mao-Maram,
Paomata and Purul subdivisions of Senapati district of Manipur due to
cancellation of census results.
N - Stands for negligible.
Pratap Naik, S.J.
