English is our 2nd language
More Indians speak English than any language, with the sole exception of Hindi. What's more, English speakers in India outnumber those in all of Europe, barring the United Kingdom. Not just that, India's legion of the English-speaking is also more than twice as large as the population of the UK.
These facts emerge from an analysis of census 2001 data on bilingualism and trilingualism in India that has been released recently. The data also revealed Indians' prowess for speaking many languages. As many as 255 million Indians speak at least two languages and 87.5 million speak three or more languages. In other words, about a quarter of the population speaks more than one language. While English was the primary language for barely 2.3 lakh Indians at the time of the census, more than 86 million listed it as their second language and another 39 million as their third language, taking the total number of English speakers in India at the time to over 125 million.
The only language that had a larger number of speakers was Hindi with 551.4 million, consisting of 422 million for whom it was the primary tongue, 98.2 million for whom Hindi was the second language and 31.2 million who listed it as their third language. Bengali, which was the second largest Indian language in terms of primary speakers, falls to a distant third. Including those who spoke Bengali as their first, second or third language gives a number of 91.1 million, comfortably behind English. Telugu with 85 million speakers and Marathi with 84.2 million retain their position behind Bengali as does Tamil with 66.7 million and Urdu with 59 million.
14 cr rural Indians are bilingual
Gujarati language now falls behind Kannada though in terms of primary speakers of the language it had a sizeable lead with 46.1 million compared to Kannada's 37.9 million.
The linguistic variety of Karnataka means that there are many who have other languages as their first language, but Kannada as a second language. This adds 11.5 million to the ranks of Kannada speakers and another 1.4 million use it as a third language. In total, therefore, Kannada had 50.8 million speaking the tongue in 2001 compared to Gujarati's 50.3 million.
These facts emerge from an analysis of census 2001 data on bilingualism and trilingualism in India. The data also revealed Indians' prowess for speaking many languages. As many as 255 million Indians speak at least two languages and 87.5 million speak three or more languages. In other words, about a quarter of the population speaks more than one language.
Similarly, Oriya overtakes Malayalam, thanks to the 3.3 million people who listed it as their second language and 3.2 lakh who said it was their third language. Thus the total number of Oriya speakers was 36.6 million against 33.8 million Malayalam speakers. Punjabi with 31.4 million speakers and Assamese with 18.9 million are also among the most spoken languages in India. Unfortunately, the census asked people to list only up to three languages, so the numbers of those who speak more than three languages are not known.
As you would expect, urban Indians are much more likely to be multi-lingual than those in the rural areas. But that's not to say village folk are completely unilingual. As many as 136.7 million rural Indians speak at least two languages and 40.4 million speak at least three, meaning about onefifth speak more than one language. In urban India, 118.4 million speak at least two languages and 47.1 million speak three. That means about 45% of those who live in cities can speak more than one language.
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