Art & Culture Quiz: Languages and Scripts of India

There is no language family by that name in India. The Afro-Asiatic family, which the name echoes, covers Arabic, Hebrew and the Berber and Cushitic languages of West Asia and North Africa, and no Indian language belongs to it.

Kannada is one of the four major Dravidian languages, the others being Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam, and it is the official language of Karnataka.

The tribal languages of Jharkhand and the neighbouring belt of central and eastern India, namely Santali, Mundari, Ho and Kurukh's neighbours in the Munda group, belong to the Austro-Asiatic family, whose Indian branch is called Munda.

Under Article 345 a State may adopt any language in use within it as its official language, and Uttar Pradesh has adopted Hindi as its official language and Urdu as its second official language.

That amendment added four languages, Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali, to the Eighth Schedule and took the count from 18 to 22, where it stands.

When the Constitution came into force in 1950 the Eighth Schedule listed 14 languages.

It states that the official language of the Union shall be Hindi in the Devanagari script and that the form of numerals to be used shall be the international form of Indian numerals; it also allowed English to continue for fifteen years from the commencement of the Constitution, a period…

Prinsep, an officer of the East India Company mint at Calcutta, deciphered the Brahmi script in 1837, which made the edicts of Ashoka readable and opened up the early history of India.

Santali is an Austro-Asiatic language of the Munda group, spoken mainly in Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha, and Pandit Raghunath Murmu designed the Ol Chiki script for it so that it need not borrow a script from a neighbouring language.

Tamil was declared a classical language in 2004, the first language to receive the status, on the strength of its ancient Sangam literature and an independent literary tradition.