Hindi, Bengali speakers India’s least multilingual groups

The News

According to data from Census 2011, the largest linguistic groups of India namely Hindi and Bengali speakers are also the least multilingual.

Key Observations

According to the 2011 census data on multi-linguistic population, there are 31.5 crore or about 26% bilingual people and 8.6 crore or 7.1% trilingual people in India.
Hindi and Bengali speakers are the least bilingual and trilingual people in India.
Urdu and Punjabi speakers are the most multi-lingual groups in India.
Further according to the data, smaller language groups tend to be more multilingual.

Least multilingual groups

Among the 52 crore Hindi speakers, only 12% or 3.2 crore are bilingual.
Among the 9.7 crore Bengali speakers, 18% or 1.7 crore are bilingual.
Further Tamil and Telugu speakers were also relatively mono-lingual with 25% of the speakers being bilingual.
Kannada and Malayalam speakers had only 27% bilingual speakers.

Most multi-lingual group

Background

Linguistic Profile of India

According to Census 2011 there are 19569 mother tongues spoken in India.
The 19569 mother tongues are regrouped and classified under a total of 121 languages.
The 121 languages of the India are further classified as Part A and Part B languages.
Part A languages are 22 Scheduled languages included in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India.
Part B languages are those that are not included in the Eighth Schedule and thus called Non-Scheduled Languages comprising of 99 languages.
Further among Scheduled language speakers, the largest linguistic group is Hindi speakers with 52.8 crore comprising 43.63% of the total population followed by Bengali (8.03%), Marathi (6.86%), Telugu (6.70%) and Tamil (5.70%).
Sanskrit with roughly 24000 speakers is the least spoken scheduled language followed by Bodo (0.12%), Manipuri (0.15%), Konkani(0.19%) and Dogri ( 0.21%).
Based on the origin, the 121 languages are further grouped into 5 linguistic families.

Indo-Aryan is the largest linguistic group covering about 78% of the population followed by Dravidian comprising roughly 19.5% of the population.

Multilinguism in India

According to Census, multilinguism is defined as language or languages habitually spoken by each person in daily or domestic life in addition to his / her mother tongue.
The incidence of bilingualism has steadily increased in India from 9.7% in 1961 to 24.79% in 2001 and 26% in 2011.
About 31.5 crore Indians talk at least 2 languages.
Further Hindi and English are the main second languages of people in India.
About 85 million people have English as their second language and 38 millions as their third language.
Further 92 million people have Hindi as their second language and about 30 million as their third language.

Reasons

The need to become a multilingual arises due to out-group communication, specialized communication in the domains of education, administration, technology, religion, business etc.
Migration or labor mobility
Cultural contact
Annexation and colonialism
Commercial
Scientific
Territorial conquest.
Multilinguism is sustained in India by social institutions.
Multilinguism is the result of nationalism.
High incidence of Hindi and English as 2nd and 3rd language in India is due to 3-language formula adopted in formal education.

Features of Multilinguism in India

Though, English is retained as the official language of India, Article 345 of the constitution provides right to the state to adopt Hindi or any language used in its territory as its official language or languages.
Thus Article 345 is symbolic of multilinguism in India.
Further language boundaries in India are fuzzy because of cross-regional contact.
Indian multilinguism is existent both at mass and elite levels.