Question

essay on different languages of India​

Answer 1

India’s heritage in languages and literature is one of the richest in the world. Some of the languages that were spoken in India in ancient times and had a rich literature have become extinct, others remained important.

As Sanskrit is no longer a spoken language, it is still a language of many religious rituals and of literature. The old languages have left their mark on the other languages which we speak today.

There are two main groups of languages — the Indo European (Indo-Aryan) and the Dravidian. These two groups have not developed in isolation from each other. Sanskrit was the language of Indo Aryans who came to India.

Sanskrit was gradually standardized and given a highly scientific grammar by Panini. Sanskrit was the language of religion, philosophy and learning. It was used by the upper castes, the brahmans and the Kshatriyas. The common people spoke a number of dialects which are called Prakrits.

Buddhist literature was written in Pali, one of the Prakrits. Ashoka had his rock and pillar edicts inscribed in the popular languages. Among the Dravidian languages Tamil is the most ancient. In the period of Gupta’s Sanskrit again became the predominant language of learning.

The various spoken languages that developed are called Apabhrams which developed in the various regions of India in the medieval period. During the periods of Turks and the Mughals Arabic and Persian entered India. Persian became the court language. The growth of a new language-Urdu-based on the dialects of Hindi and Persian became the common language of towns alt over northern India and the Deccan. Its literature in poetry and prose developed very rich.

There are eighteen languages which have been mentioned in the constitution of India. Hundreds of other languages are spoken by the people of other areas of the country. The variety of languages has made India a multilingual country.

Answer 2

Answer:

India is the home of a very large number of languages. In fact, so many languages and dialects are spoken in India that it is often described as a ‘museum of languages’. The language diversity is by all means baffling. In popular parlance it is often described as ‘linguistic pluralism’. But this may not be a correct description. The prevailing situation in the country is not pluralistic but that of a continuum. One dialect merges into the other almost imperceptibly; one language replaces the other gradually. Moreover, along the line of contact between two languages, there is a zone of transition in which people are bilingual.

Thus lan­guages do not exist in water-tight compartments. While linguistic pluralism is a state of mutual existence of several languages in a con­tiguous space, it does not preclude the possibility of inter-connections between one language and the other. In fact, these links have grown over millennia of shared history. While linguistic pluralism continues to be a distinctive feature of the modern Indian state, it will be wrong to assume that there has been no interaction between the different groups.

Origins of language are shrouded in mystery. However, it is possible to reconstruct the bits of this history. It is generally agreed that in the history of social evolution language must have arisen with the discov­ery of the art of tool-making. Understandably, the early tool-making communities must have depended on cooperation between different members of the group on a highly organized basis.

This would have been possible through the use of a language. Thus evolution of lan­guage must have progressed hand in hand with the evolution of material cultures. As the history of material cultures shows the change in techniques of tool-making was initially slow, but later on it picked up. Language also evolved with the same pace. Expressions became more and more complex with the passage of time. In fact, at every stage of evolution, there was a direct relationship between material culture and the language in use.

Explanation:

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