1,474

ore than 19,500 languages or dialects are spoken in India as mother tongues, according to the latest analysis of a census released last week.

There are 121 languages which are spoken by 10,000 or more people in India, which has a population of 1.21 billion, it said.

The Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India, said since a household may consist of persons related by blood or of unrelated persons or a mix of both, it is absolutely necessary to ask every person about her or his mother tongue.

It was required because the mother tongue of each member of a household need not necessarily be the same — and may be different for different members in the household.

The number of such raw returns of mother tongues has totalled 19,569, the report of the 2011 census said. However, 96.71 per cent of the population have

tongues were treated as ‘unclassified’ during census analysis

one of the 22 scheduled languages as their mother tongue.

Since mother tongues, as returned in the census, are basically the designations provided by the respondents of the linguistic mediums in which the respondents think they communicate, they need not be identical with the actual linguistic mediums, it said.

For assessing the correlation between the mother tongue and designations of the census and for presenting the numerous raw returns in terms of their linguistic affiliation to actual languages and dialects, 19,569 raw returns were subjected to thorough linguistic