Category:Indian
From Namespedia - Names Meaning and Origins
The Indian subcontinent consists of a number of separate linguistic communities each of which share a common language and culture. The people of India speak many languages and dialects.Some experts consider there are 4 major language families:Indo-European, Dravidian, Mon-Khmer, and Sino-Tibetan.Indo-European and Dravidian languages are used by a large majority of India's population( 70%). The language families divide roughly into geographic groups. Languages of the Indo-European group are spoken mainly in northern and central regions. Officially there are 18 recognized languages in India (3 of them,Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali were added in 1992).Some Indian languages have a long literary history--Tamil literature is 3,000 years old and Sanskrit is more than 5,000 years old (the old Sanskrit is called Vedic or Vedic Sanskrit.It became simplified as it changed into classical Sanskrit, in the 400's B.C.).Sanskrit has a complex grammar. For example, nouns and adjectives have three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter). They are inflected for three grammatical numbers (singular, dual, and plural). They also have eight cases (nominative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, locative, and vocative). The number of people speaking each language varies greatly..Hindi has more than 250 million speakers, but relatively few people speak Andamanese.Although some of the languages are called "tribal" or "aboriginal", their populations may be larger than those that speak some European languages. For example,Bhili and Santali,both tribal languages, each have more than 4 million speakers.Gondi is spoken by nearly 2 million people. India's schools teach 58 different languages. The nation has newspapers in 87 languages, radio programmes in 71, and films in 15.
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Articles in category "Indian"
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