Hyderabad: Telugu is not the third most spoken language in India anymore; it has been replaced by Marathi, according to new census data figures.
There are 8.1 crore Telugu speakers and 8.3 crore Marathi speakers. Also, Telugu is fourth in the list of slowest growing languages at the rate of 9.65 per cent.
Hindi and Bengali continue to be the most widely spoken languages and the fastest growing, followed by Kashmiri.
Another decline is in the number of Urdu speakers, who are mostly spread across Hyderabad, Lucknow and some parts of Delhi.
The number of people speaking Urdu has dropped by 1.58 per cent. Urdu dropped from sixth place in 2001 (51 million speakers) to seventh place in 2011 with 50 million people mentioning it as their mother tongue. The biggest drop is for Konkani (95 lakh).
Language experts mostly disagreed with the data. Vice Chancellor of Potti Sriramulu Telugu University, Prof. S.V. Satyanarayana, called the data misleading. He said, “Telugu speakers have been partially assessed. Have they taken into account Telugus living in Kharagpur, Bhilai, and Odisha? If these regions were considered, Telugu is the second most spoken, or third, but not fourth. I think many Telugus have been kept aside while assessing. The report should be reviewed and not considered as final.”
Mr Mamidi Harikrishna, director of the TS department of language and culture, who argued for classical language status for Telugu language in the Madras High Court on behalf of the state government, said, “Over a decade, the expansion of the Telugu community is enormous. The prime parameter to judge a language should be its population of speakers. If that is the case, growth in the Telugu region has been 2.5 per cent as per the 2011 census.”
“This is considered to be the highest. Rise in population has been reported in the rural areas, which are not influenced by other languages. Secondly, in the Information Technology belt, most employees are Telugu speakers. These are indictors to prove that Telugu is the second most spoken language,” he said.
Language census a surprise for Telugus
Telugu is not the third most spoken language in India anymore; it has been replaced by Marathi, according to new census data figures. There are 8.1 crore Telugu speakers and 8.3 crore Marathi speakers.
Mr Enugu Narasimha Reddy, secretary of the Telangana Sahitya Acad-emy, called the report “strange” because “Telugus are spread across the majority of the states in India, densely populated in Karnataka, Northern Tamil Nadu, Odisha, the border of Telangana with Mahara-shtra and Chhattisgarh. I am of the impression that Telugu is the most popular language after Hindi.”
India has 52 crore people speaking in the Scheduled Languages according to the 2011 census, an increase of 10 crore from 2001.
The most number of English speakers are in Maharashtra followed by Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. There are around 260,000 registered English speakers.
Census has also found that India’s most spoken language continues to be Hindi followed by Bengali (97 million speakers). Hindi is the fastest growing language, with 25.19 per cent which is close to 1 crore speakers between 2001-2011. Second is Kashmiri (22.97 per cent, Gujarati (20.4 per cent), Manipuri (20.07 per cent), and Bengali (16.63 per cent). Nepali, Malayalam, Sindhi, Telugu and Bodo are the slowest growing languages.
