In addition to the languages to be used by the union government, the constitution of India conceives of a situation of having each state its own official language.After India`s independence the government decided that the official language of India would be Hindi, which belongs to the family of Aryan languages. But the speakers of the other languages more specifically the Dravidian languages opposed it. Basically they were scared of loosing their language culture. There was a valid reason why Hindi should be chosen as the official language, this is not just that it is most commonly spoken language but it has the connection with Indian history even before its independence.
The different states of India have different official languages, out of which some are not recognized by the central government. Some states have more then one official language. As for example, Bihar in east India has three official languages namely Hindi, Urdu and Bengali, all recognized by the central government. But in Sikkim there are four official languages out of which only Nepali is recognized by the central government. Besides the languages officially recognized by central or state governments, there are some other languages also which don`t have this recognition. So it is very obvious that their speakers are running political struggles to get this recognition.
Now as decided by the union Government every states in India has its official language. In this way Punjabi, Bengali, Hindi, Oriya, Chattisgarhi, etc are official language whereas Sadri, Nimadi, sindhi, etc are not included in the list.
Official languages of India
Apart from Hindi and English, a total of 21 other languages are recognized as official languages by the Constitution of India:
|