The People’s Linguistic Survey of India Volumes: Neither Linguistics, Nor a Successor to Grierson’s LSI, but still a Point of Reference

The data on languages and mother tongues collected by the 2011 Census has been in for some months now. Once again, Hindi has emerged as the language spoken by the most number of people: 4,363 out of every 10,000 citizens speak it, which when compared to the language that comes in second in this dist...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSocial Change Vol. 49; no. 1; pp. 154 - 159
Main Author Kidwai, Ayesha
Format Book Review Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New Delhi, India SAGE Publications 01.03.2019
Sage Publications, New Delhi India
Subjects
Bengali
Censuses
Citizens
Hindi language
Language
Linguistics
Responses
Social change
India
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Summary:The data on languages and mother tongues collected by the 2011 Census has been in for some months now. Once again, Hindi has emerged as the language spoken by the most number of people: 4,363 out of every 10,000 citizens speak it, which when compared to the language that comes in second in this distribution, Bangla with 803 speakers, once again underlines the national spread of this language. ONce again, India is shown to be a country with an admirable linguistic diversity, it has 270 mother tongues which are grouped into two sets as Scheduled Languages and Non-Scheduled Languages. Responses tabulated by the 2011 Census show that 96.71 per cent of the Indian population has, '...one of the Scheduled Languages as their mother tongue, the remaining 3.29 per cent is accounted for by other languages'.
ISSN:0049-0857
0976-3538
DOI:10.1177/0049085718821783