Linguistic map of India

"Language families and branches, languages and dialects" FROM A HISOTICAL ATLAS OF SOUTH ASIA, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. NEW YORK, 1992

I just had to post this map - it has SO much information. I only wish it were larger. Note the script break-down in the map on the lower left-hand corner!

I often find it hard to comprehend the diversity and huge number of people in South Asia, so infographics and charts always help me. Especially amazing is this Wikipedia page on the number of Indian languages by number of native speakers.

Some quick interesting facts: Encarta estimates that 336 million Indians speak Hindi as their first language. Aside from Tibetan, the rest of the languages whose scripts are profiled on my blog have est. between 32.3 - 69.9 million native speakers each. There are 416 living languages in India. 19.4% of Indians are bilingual, 7.2% trilingual. An estimated 350 million Indians speak English as a second language, making it the second-largest English-speaking population after the U.S.. There are approximately 1.13 billion Indians alive today. One out of every 6 people on the Earth is Indian.