India has 23 constitutionally recognized official languages. Hindi and English are the official languages used by the Central Government. State governments use respective official languages.

Hindi is the most widely spoken language in northern parts of India. The Indian census takes the widest possible definition of "Hindi" as a broad variety of "Hindi languages". According to 2001 Census, 53.6% of Indian population declared that they speak Hindi either as first or second language, in which 41% of them have declared it as their native language or mother tongue. 13% Indians declared that they can speak English as a second language.

Thirteen languages account for more than 1% of Indian population each, and between themselves for over 95%; all of them are "scheduled languages of the constitution". Scheduled languages spoken by fewer than 1% of Indians are Santali (0.63%), Kashmiri (0.54%), Nepali (0.28%), Sindhi (0.25%), Konkani (0.24%), Dogri (0.22%), Meitei (0.14%), Bodo (0.13%) and Sanskrit (In the 2001 census of India, only 14,135 people reported Sanskrit as their native language). The largest language that is not "scheduled" is Bhili (0.95%), followed by Gondi (0.27%), Khandeshi (0.21%), Tulu (0.17%) and Kurukh (0.10%).

Indian population in 1991 exhibited 19.4% of bilingualism and 7.2% of trilingualism, so that the total percentage of "native languages" is at about 127%. 

India has a Greenberg's diversity index of 0.914, i.e. two people selected at random from the country will have different native languages in 91.4% of cases.

भाषिकांच्या संख्येनुसार मातृभाषांची यादी
मूळ भाषिकांच्या संख्येनुसार भाषांची यादी
More than one million speakers
आढावा