How many languages does India speak?

Ask ‘how many languages are spoken in India?’ and you will get several correct answers, depending on what you count.

The Constitution of India lists 22 scheduled languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada and Malayalam. The census counts 121 languages with at least 10,000 speakers each. Count every mother tongue people reported, and the number passes 19,000.

These languages come from several families. Hindi and Bengali belong to the Indo-Aryan family. Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada are Dravidian — a family found almost nowhere else on Earth. In the north-east, many languages are Tibeto-Burman.

English is not a scheduled language, yet it is one of the two official languages of the Union, used in courts, business and higher education. For a Malayali, English is often a bridge not to the world but to the next state.