Official Languages of States and UTs: Articles and Lists

The correct answer is B, Article 343. It says that the official language of the Union shall be Hindi in the Devanagari script and that the international form of Indian numerals shall be used, with English to continue for fifteen years from the commencement of the Constitution; the Official Languages Act, 1963 then allowed English to continue beyond that period. Option A, Article 341, deals with the President notifying the Scheduled Castes for a state and has nothing to do with language. Option C, Article 345, is about the official language of a state, adopted by its own legislature, so it is the natural distractor here. Option D, Article 351, contains the directive to the Union to promote the spread of Hindi and to enrich it by drawing on Sanskrit and the other languages of India. Remember also that the Constitution never uses the words national language.

The correct answer is B, Article 345. It allows the legislature of a state to adopt by law any one or more of the languages in use in that state, or Hindi, as the language or languages to be used for all or any of the official purposes of that state, and until it does so English continues to be used. Option A, Article 344, provides for the Official Language Commission appointed by the President and for a Committee of Parliament on official language. Option C, Article 347, lets the President, on a demand being made, direct that a language spoken by a substantial proportion of the population of a state be officially recognised in the whole state or a part of it. Option D, Article 350, gives a person the right to submit a representation for the redress of a grievance in any language used in the Union or in the state.

The correct answer is C, 22. The Eighth Schedule began with fourteen languages in 1950, and three amendments took the list to twenty-two: Sindhi in 1967, Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali in 1992, and Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali by the Ninety-second Amendment passed in 2003. Option A, 14, is the original number and is correct only for 1950. Option B, 18, was the number between 1992 and the Ninety-second Amendment, which is why it appears so often as a distractor. Option D, 28, is not a figure the schedule has ever held, though several more languages have been demanded for inclusion. Two further points help in the examination: a language in the schedule need not be the official language of any state, as the cases of Sanskrit and Sindhi show, and candidates may write many public examinations in these languages.

The correct answer is C, the Ninety-second Amendment, passed in 2003, which took the Eighth Schedule from eighteen languages to twenty-two by adding Bodo of Assam, Dogri of the Jammu region, Maithili of Bihar and Santhali, the language of the Santhal people spread over Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha. Option A, the Twenty-first Amendment of 1967, added Sindhi, the language of a community that came to India at Partition without a state of its own. Option B, the Seventy-first Amendment of 1992, added Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali together. Option D, the One Hundred and First Amendment, brought in the Goods and Services Tax and has nothing to do with language. A simple way to hold the sequence is fourteen in 1950, fifteen in 1967, eighteen in 1992 and twenty-two from the amendment of 2003.

The correct answer is A, Nagaland. The state has many tribal languages and no single dominant tongue, so English, already the language of administration and of education through the churches and schools, was adopted as the official language; Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya have done the same, Meghalaya using Khasi and Garo as associate languages. Option B, Manipur, has Manipuri, also called Meiteilon, as its official language, and Manipuri is in the Eighth Schedule. Option C, Tripura, uses Bengali and Kokborok along with English. Option D, Assam, has Assamese, with Bengali used in the Barak valley districts and Bodo in the Bodoland region. The north-eastern states are a favourite of paper setters precisely because the answers differ from state to state, so learn them as a short list rather than by guessing.

The correct answer is C, Konkani in the Devanagari script. The Goa, Daman and Diu Official Language Act of 1987 made Konkani the official language, and the same year Goa became a full state; the script is specified because Konkani is written in more than one script. Option A, Marathi, is wrong as the official language, although the Act allows Marathi to be used for official purposes as well, and much official correspondence in Goa does take place in Marathi. Option B, Portuguese, was the language of the colonial administration until the liberation of Goa in 1961, but it has no official status now. Option D, Kannada, is the official language of neighbouring Karnataka. Konkani was added to the Eighth Schedule in 1992 by the Seventy-first Amendment, which is the fact most often paired with this question.

The correct answer is A, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. Uttarakhand made Sanskrit its second official language in 2010 and Himachal Pradesh followed in 2019, both keeping Hindi as the first official language; the step is largely symbolic but is asked very often. Option B, Bihar and Jharkhand, have Hindi as the official language with Urdu as the additional official language, and Jharkhand recognises several tribal and regional languages besides. Option C, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, use Hindi, and Chhattisgarh also recognises Chhattisgarhi. Option D, Haryana and Punjab, have Hindi and Punjabi respectively, with Punjabi as the second official language of Haryana. Sanskrit is in the Eighth Schedule and is one of the classical languages, so it appears in three different lists, which is why candidates confuse them.

The correct answer is B, Malayalam. The islands lie off the Kerala coast, their people speak a dialect close to Malayalam except on Minicoy, where Mahl is spoken, and the administration works in Malayalam along with English. Option A, Tamil, is the official language of Tamil Nadu and of the union territory of Puducherry, not of Lakshadweep. Option C, Kannada, belongs to Karnataka, the state nearest to the islands on the mainland map, which makes it a tempting but wrong choice. Option D, Hindi, is the official language of Delhi and, with English, of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, but not of Lakshadweep. For the union territories learn the short list: Hindi in Delhi, Tamil in Puducherry, Malayalam in Lakshadweep, Hindi and English in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, English in Chandigarh.

The correct answer is B, Article 350B. Inserted by the Seventh Amendment Act of 1956, it provides for a Special Officer for Linguistic Minorities appointed by the President to investigate all matters relating to the safeguards given to linguistic minorities and to report to the President, who causes the report to be laid before Parliament; the officer is known as the Commissioner for Linguistic Minorities. Option A, Article 350A, which came in by the same amendment, directs states and local authorities to provide instruction in the mother tongue at the primary stage to children of linguistic minorities. Option C, Article 351, is the directive on the development of Hindi. Option D, Article 348, keeps the proceedings of the Supreme Court and the High Courts and the authoritative texts of laws in English. The 350A and 350B pair is the one most often reversed in the examination hall.

The correct answer is A, Andhra, carved out of the Telugu-speaking districts of the Madras state in 1953 after the death of Potti Sriramulu, who fasted for the demand. The movement forced the government to appoint the States Reorganisation Commission under Fazl Ali, whose report of 1955 led to the States Reorganisation Act of 1956 and to a map drawn largely along language lines. Option B, Gujarat, and option C, Maharashtra, came later, in 1960, when the bilingual Bombay state was divided between Gujarati and Marathi speakers. Option D, Haryana, was separated from Punjab in 1966 on the recommendation of the Shah Commission, a division in which language again played the main part. Note the order of the three dates, 1953, 1956 and 1960, because questions often ask which came first.

The correct answer is A. The three language formula, recommended by the Kothari Commission and adopted in the National Policy on Education, places the mother tongue or the regional language first, Hindi second and English third in Hindi-speaking states, while non-Hindi states teach the regional language, Hindi and English; in practice some states substitute another modern Indian language for Hindi. Options B and D are wrong because they put English first, which no version of the formula does: the first language in every version is the child own language, since early learning is best in the mother tongue. Option C reverses the second and third places by putting English before Hindi, and although that is how many schools actually work, the formula as framed names Hindi as the second language. The purpose of the scheme is to protect the mother tongue, give a link language for the country and keep a window to the world.